Liv signed her name on the thirteenth and final piece of parchment, completing the final letter to the last of the soldiers who had died when Umbris turned his shadows on her soldiers. That didn’t count Lina, of course, who’d been a member of her personal guard, nor did it count the half dozen soldiers who had survived, but taken wounds so severe that they would never fight again. The remaining eleven who had stood with her friends, while Arjun and the rest of the soldiers got the people they’d rescued up and out of the crater, hadn’t come away unharmed either, but they would recover.

  The writing of the letters had become a tradition for her, beginning all the way back with the death of Isabel Tanner, at the bottom of the Well of Bones. That first one had come at the command of Archmagus Loredon, and she’d struggled to write it. Now, the words were almost routing, and the phrases all seemed to bleed together in her mind.

  Her shoulder twinged when she set her quill aside, on the camp table that had been set up over her lap, and though she did her best to keep herself from flinching, and not show it in her face, Arjun noticed.

  “You shouldn’t be writing,” he chastised her. “You shouldn’t even be sitting up. The cartilage around all four dislocation sites is severely torn. This kind of thing can take months to heal, even with a combination of surgery and magic.”

  “Which is why I have you,” Liv told him. “And why I was cycling mana through my right arm all night –”

  “When you should have been sleeping,” her friend grumbled.

  “– so that I could write these letters,” she finished. “This is something I need to do.” Her left arm was, at the insistence of the healers, in a sling.

  “It could have waited,” Arjun argued.

  “The families of my soldiers deserve to know what happened, as soon as they can, by my own hand,” Liv said. As far as she was concerned, the discussion was over. She leaned her head back into the pillow that Keri had propped up for her, and closed her eyes. A wind blew in, rustling the enchanted scarf she wore, and pulling strands of her hair loose. This time it didn’t come from the direction of the crater, but that happened often enough that the canvas tents all across the encampment had soaked in the smell of rotten eggs. Most soldiers now wore their scarves constantly.

  It had been three days since Liv froze Umbris in ice, preserving the black wyrm with the same spell that her family had been using for everything from shipping food, to transporting the wounded, for decades. It was the same magic that had kept Ghveris asleep for a thousand years, since the final days of the war against the V?dim, and that was the reason three dozen sleeping children of Ractia had been extracted, alive, from the ruined undercity of Godsgrave.

  “How is progress on the third chamber coming?” Liv asked. It was pleasant to keep her eyes closed.

  “Less quickly than if we had you,” Arjun admitted. “Sidonie and Kaija can work together to get it done, but only one of them is really a dedicated mage.” He chuckled out loud. “You know most of your guard refers to her as an ‘old battleaxe?’ I think there’s something about the idiom that’s lost in translation.”

  Liv smiled. “I like that nickname,” she admitted. And it was true: while Kaija had been taught to thaw that spell, she couldn’t cast it. “When do you think they’ll be ready to move? Tomorrow?”

  “I’d call it another two days, to be safe,” Arjun said. “I don’t envy Soaring Eagle having to get them all north without a waystone to use.”

  “Add it to the list,” Liv muttered. “A waystone for Clear Water Cenote. We’ll get around to it – eventually. And our wounded?”

  “The only person left with a tether – other than you – is Kaija. I don’t suppose you’d consider ordering her to take them all back to Bald Peak?”

  “She wouldn’t listen if I did,” Liv told him. “Not while I’m still here and wounded. We’ll just have to get them all home once the rescue operation is complete.” She hesitated, then opened her eyes. She wanted to be able to see Arjun’s face when she asked the next question. “Are there going to be enough of them?”

  Arjun shifted in the other camp chair. “That depends on what you mean by ‘enough,” he said, after a moment. “Enough to nearly double the numbers of the Red Shield tribe? Yes. Enough that even with their abysmal birth rates, they see a few more children? I’d say so.”

  “Enough that they’re still here in another thousand years?”

  “No.” Arjun shook his head immediately. “No, not at all. We have numbers on this, in Lendh ka Dakruim,” he explained. “How many of each jati we need to have in order to prevent deformities through inbreeding. We don’t let any get below four thousand. The Red Shields are nowhere near that, and they’ve already been struggling. If it wasn’t for the fact that regular fresh blood keeps them from aging, they’d never have lasted this long.”

  The words were like a headsman’s axe falling, and Liv closed her eyes again. She’d thought Arjun might have danced around the answer, but she should have known better. Her friend had always been brutally honest when it came to questions of medicine. “We failed, then,” she said. “We got here too late. If we’d come as soon as Ractia fled –”

  “It wouldn’t have been enough,” Arjun told her. “I’ve got a pretty good idea of when the people in those caskets died. Another six or seven survivors wouldn’t matter to the long term survival of the tribe.”

  “There might be more, hidden in another rift,” Liv said, after a moment. “If there are, we’ll find them. Archmagus Loredon’s promised us culling teams, to help Wren search.”

  “Unless they find perfectly preserved enchantments and five hundred living people, it isn’t going to be enough,” Arjun stated. The finality of his tone was jarring.

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before we came here?” Liv demanded.

  “Before we looked, we didn’t know how many would be in a chamber, or that most of the caskets would be failing,” Arjun pointed out. “For all I knew, we were going to pull two thousand people out of this crater. We didn’t find anywhere near that many survivors. Now that we have a better idea what we could expect to find somewhere else – if there is anywhere else – I think the conclusion is pretty clear. If they want to survive, the Red Shields are going to have to start having children with other people.”

  “Just like the Vakansa.” Liv sighed. “They made such a mess of us. The V?dim. Ractia, and all the others who just wanted pretty little things to sing and dance for them, or to warm their beds. Or who wanted soldiers to save their lives, when they couldn’t fight our ancestors off themselves. They really didn’t care whether the slaves they made would last.”

  “It’s ironic that humans have come out the best of all their servants,” Arjun said. “They cared about us the least, so they changed us the least.”

  He used the word ‘us,’ but Liv realized that she wasn’t really included in that statement. She might have been half human, when she was born; but after everything she’d seen and done, she would live far longer than the people who’d raised her. She wondered whether that meant she’d have the same difficulty conceiving a child as the Red Shields did, or the Eld.

  With an effort, she put the thought aside for later. It wasn’t important right now. “How bad are the cases of mana poisoning?” Liv asked.

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  “Nothing that’s going to be fatal, yet,” Arjun said. “We try to rotate people in and out of the rift regularly, and both Sidonie and Karina have helped me pull excess mana out of the soldiers. We have enough healers to cut away corrupted flesh. But the longer we stay here, the worse it’s going to get. At some point you’ll need to restrict rift duty to only Elden soldiers.”

  “We’re going to try to get out of here before things get that bad,” Liv said. “As soon as the last of the caskets are open, and as soon as Silica’s come.” Suddenly, she was very tired. “Tell me when she gets here, please. Wake me up, if you have to.”

  ?

  But when the time came, it was Keri who woke her.

  Thora and Miina had helped Liv back into her tent, and into her cot, after Arjun had returned to his patients. She wasn’t supposed to walk, and though she could easily have carried herself using constructs of coherent mana, everyone was worried that she’d let herself fall. So, instead, the two women held the canvas and cheesecloth away from the entrance, while two of Liv’s guards lifted her camp chair and carried her in.

  It was, she grumbled to herself, at least one advantage of being so small.

  She’d begun by circulating mana through her hips, doing her best to encourage the cartilage to heal more quickly, but the effort had quickly exhausted her. Liv didn’t actually remember falling asleep: she simply woke up with Keri’s hand on her shoulder, giving her a gentle shake.

  “Oh. Hello,” she said, blinking her eyes up at him. “How late is it?”

  “Nearly time for the evening meal.” He had his helm off, and was smiling, but Keri’s armor was coated in dust and dried blood. “We’ve finished pulling the survivors out of the third chamber, but they’re going to need a bit of time to recover.”

  Liv began to sit up, but it was hard to do without hurting her hips and her shoulders. Before she could fall back onto the pillow, however, she felt Keri’s hand at her back, pushing her upright. “This is miserable,” she complained. “I wish he’d left me at least one leg. Something.”

  “Next time, do your snowstorm trick sooner,” Keri teased her. “You know you’re going to be the one in the wheeled chair this time?”

  “Absolutely not,” Liv declared, raising her voice. “Anyway, what is it?”

  “Silica.”

  “Right then.” Liv sighed. “Can you help me stand up?”

  Keri shook his head. “Arjun would slit my throat in my sleep if I let you stand on those hips. You’re lucky he hasn’t plastered you up until you can’t move. Do you want me to carry you out, or do you want your guards?”

  “You,” Liv decided. “But not until you’ve taken that filthy armor off. Some of us are actually clean, here.”

  Keri met her eyes for a moment, and then nodded. He worked at the buckles that held his cuirass and pauldrons on, his fingers moving with the ease of long practice. His pauldrons clanked down onto the rugs that served as a floor of her tent, followed by one piece of armor after another. When he finally pulled his gambeson off, his linen shirt tugged up to expose his belly.

  “I’m surprised Thora let you in here alone,” Liv told him. Her maid would absolutely go insane if she saw Keri undressing in front of her, even if he was only shedding his armor.

  “I think we’ve made peace,” Keri declared, which sounded entirely out of character to Liv. A moment later, he scooped her up in his arms, cradling her as gently as a piece of glass. It didn’t stop her body from screaming at her, where each limb had been roughly yanked from its socket, but she wouldn’t let him know how much it hurt.

  Silica, it turned out, had settled herself outside the camp rather than risk knocking aside tents or crates of supplies when she moved too quickly. Keri didn’t even slow down when he took Liv up the wooden steps to the watchtower, where Thora – who’d been waiting with Liv’s chair and pillows – quickly set her up a space to sit. Only when Liv was finally settled did Silica swing her long neck away from the direction of the crater, to where she and Liv could make eye contact.

  “You look terrible,” the wyrm from the desert began, as soon as Keri and Thora had stepped out of the way.

  “You can thank your brother for that,” Liv grumbled. “That is how it works, isn’t it? Both you and Umbris were from the first clutch?”

  Silica bowed her head, lowering it perhaps two feet in an approximation of a nod. “Yes – if that truly is Umbris that I can see frozen in the crater.”

  Of course; when she raised herself up on her coils, Silica could probably see just as far as the soldiers who kept watch from the tower. Actually, she’d probably gotten an eyeful of the frozen wyrm when she flew in. It occurred to Liv that the pain from her injuries might well be muddling her thoughts.

  “You have reason to think it isn’t him?” Liv asked, with a frown.

  “The only wyrm I’ve ever seen that reached that size was Iravata herself,” Silica stated. “Umbris shouldn’t be any larger than I am. If it is him, how did he grow that large? Why didn’t he ever find me – and why did I never have the slightest word that he was alive, after all these years?”

  “He seemed nearly obsessive about the idea that I might do something to Iravata’s corpse,” Liv explained. “When my cousin first saw him, he was curled up around it. And he had a clutch of eggs near her, apparently.”

  Silica turned her neck enough to look down into the crater. “I will have to speak to him,” she decided, after a moment’s consideration. “It is the only way to get answers.”

  Liv almost offered to take the wyrm into her brother’s dreams, but thought better of the idea. “I’m going to leave him with you,” she said. “And I’m going to trust that you can handle him. I hope – I really truly hope – that if it is your brother, you can help him understand what’s actually going on. I went out of my way not to kill him, Silica, but it cost us.”

  “Thank you. I am grateful," the great serpent said.

  “I’m not certain that it was worth the cost,” Liv told her honestly. “Thirteen men and women are dead, and more wounded. Every one of them was a child or a parent, a husband or a wife, a brother or a sister, and Umbris killed them.” She sighed. “I don’t trust myself to keep an even temper once he’s awake. And I don’t trust him around my people. So, I’m going to ask you to wait until we’ve moved everyone out. We can only take a few back with tethers, and everyone else is going to have to make the trip back to the waystone at the bridge rift. Once they’re on their way, I’ll break the spell. It should take a few moments to melt away, and the last of us will be gone by the time he knows what's happening.”

  “That is more than acceptable,” Silica said. “I owe you a debt, Livara. I will not forget what you have done.”

  She nodded, waved her right hand without thinking, and then gasped at the jolt of pain from her shoulder.

  “Liv needs rest, and time to recover,” Keri said, stepping in for her. “We’re going to take her back to her tent now.”

  Once he’d lifted her up, pressed against his chest, Liv allowed her eyes to close. Once he’d carried her back to her tent, she allowed herself to speak. “I’m tired. I’m ready to go home.”

  “You kept your promise to Wren and Ghveris,” Keri told her. “We’ll get you back to Bald Peak in a day or so.”

  ?

  The alliance army began moving out first, under Soile’s command. Soldiers scurried about the camp, tearing down tents and packing supplies. The scorpions which had been mounted above the gate were disassembled and carefully repacked into wooden crates, which were loaded onto wagons. The wagons made the slow trip back through the jungle to the river, where Liv was told that the Kerian soldiers had been experimenting with linking two canoes together using a raft-like platform of wood, onto which supplies could be lashed down with rope.

  It was a fascinating idea, but Liv left it to Soile and her subordinates. Soaring Eagle left next, with the hunters he’d brought from Clear Water Cenote, the dreamers they’d rescued from Ractia’s ancient machines, and even Wren.

  “I want to see them all home safely,” the huntress explained, when she said farewell to Liv, Keri, Arjun, and Ghveris. “I won’t stay for long, and I’ll get the Eld at the dam to send me back through the waystone there. But it might take a while to get them all through the jungle; they aren’t used to a long flight, or to hunting. Apparently most of this land was cleared, when last they were awake.”

  “I wish I could go with you,” Ghveris admitted.

  Liv was surprised to hear him say it aloud: the war-machine hardly ever admitted any sort of weakness or vulnerability. Apparently Wren had, somewhere along the way, become an exception to that rule.

  “If you could fly, I know you’d be there,” Wren told him, reaching out to take his enormous gauntlet in her much smaller hand. “But we’ve still got two halves of a dream stone, so we can stay in contact. And if anything goes wrong, Liv, I’ll let you know that way.”

  What Arjun had said rose to the tip of Liv’s tongue, but she swallowed the words. Let the Red Shields celebrate the people they’d rescued; Liv could talk to them about their future later. There would be time enough.

  A moment later, dozens of bats wheeled up into the sky over the jungle canopy, circled once, and then flew off to the north.

  volume nine is off and running!

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

  close to extinction at one point, with less than 2,000 of us. The Red Shields have less than that, which is why Arjun believes they're going to need to interbreed with Eld/Humans/etc.

  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. Is literally the most frustraing patient in the world. [36+ Rings of Mana, not counting mana stored in items.]

  Arjun Iyuz - Journeyman Guildmage from Lendh ka Dakruim; his jati specializes in healing magic. Considering what word of power might be best used to restrain his friend. [18 Rings of Mana]

  Inkeris "Keri" ka Ilmari k?n B?lris - A young warrior of the Unconquered House of B?lris, father to Rei. Feeling a certain amount of schadenfreude at the prospect of someone other than him being in a wheelchair for a while. [20 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. Really feeling the loss of his shapeshifting, here. [Mana Battery: 10 Rings]

  Silica - One of the original Great Wyrms, created by Iravata before the Vaedim were overthrown. Has a brother who has become an abomination through abuse of the word of growth! [36 Rings of Mana]

  Wren Wind Dancer - Daughter of Nighthawk, cousin of Calm Waters. Got one of the three things she's been dreaming of.