The baroness spent the rest of the night in a tenuous trance, haunted by nightmares. Unlike Harrim, she had not become a fan of Octavia's anti-nightmare tea blend. It tasted delicious but had no effect on her at all. The nightmares pushed through everything, through Via's special infusion, even through the sopor induced by edelcup root. So Guelder embraced them as befitted a stray cub of Lamashtu, savouring every single drop of the horror within her head.

  But of course, Hazel would have none of that. They insisted on waking her up at the worst moment and, by doing so, effectively prevented her from figuring out what the nightmares were trying to tell her. As they were doing now.

  Guelder's fingers closed around Hazel's wrist as their hand was stroking her face, and pushed it away, gently but firmly.

  "Hazel, I have already asked you not to..."

  Peeking out from under her eyelashes, the first thing she saw was their face, looking at her with big, dark, worried eyes.

  "Sorry, Guel. This is not a time to indulge in exhausting nighttime visions and then start the new day squeezed dry like a lemon. No trance is better than a bad trance."

  "Thanks for always knowing better what is good for me," said Guelder sharply, glowering at her friend. Anger did wonders to banish her drowsiness. "Next time I will use my claws."

  "Oh. What did I interrupt that makes you so riled up?"

  Guelder rubbed her forehead, starting from the root of her nose.

  "Never mind," she muttered.

  "More importantly, why have you crumpled my map?"

  The baroness looked down on her lap. Indeed, Hazel's map with the Sister's markings lay there, in a far from decent condition. She must have been clutching it all night long. Embarrassed, she smoothed it out and folded it up nicely.

  "Because... Well, this is where our next steps are written out. We have three Defaced Sisters to check on... in three different corners of the barony. Wake up the others until I decide where we start, will you?"

  A few hours later, the field team was trudging towards the site named The Sepulchre of Forgotten Heroes. Unsurprisingly, the raven was following them from a distance, either in the hope of plunging its beak into fresh kill or just to make them uneasy. It even worked, until Guelder's companions came up with a little game. Valerie tried to distract the bird with a chunk of meat, while Hazel nocked an arrow, Linzi took aim with a rock, or Amiri tried to sneak up on it with Ginormous in hand and an eardrum-shattering battle roar. Guelder couldn't find it in herself to stand up for the mysterious bird as she would have done for a real one. Instead, she was happy that her friends found a way to keep their morale up all by themselves. Since her own cup felt deplorably empty, it was a good thing she didn't need to pour from it.

  Finally, Linzi abandoned the game and immersed herself in a pocket edition of The Basics of Cyclopean Epigraphy nicked from a drawer in Varnhold Keep, just in case they would find some inscriptions that would shed light on the question of the vordakai. Was it the mysterious artifact the Tiger Lords were after? Was that the reason why the Sister had been so quick to dismiss Guelder's question about it?

  Summer had come all too early this year. The midday sun's warmth soon turned into an unpleasant heat in a countryside mostly barren from trees. There were no clouds to hide it from time to time, nor a breeze to bring respite in the early heat. The grass, reaching up to their knees (or in Linzi's case, hips), already started to turn yellow.

  Guelder took a good swig from her canteen. Hazel had been right. She did feel squeezed out, and the thought that she had to travel up and down the land, wasting precious time for the mere promise of a potentially useless answer, didn't help a bit. She found herself missing Jaethal. Even though an Urgathoan was not the best choice to bring into a barony infested by zombie cyclopes, perhaps the inquisitor would have obtained those answers sooner and without unnecessary detours.

  She cringed when she realised where her train of thoughts was heading. Was Hazel right in this, too? Was she becoming a ruthless tyrant, ready to apply torture just to speed things up? On the other hand, could she afford the luxury of a moral high horse when her beloved friends were in trouble?

  "You have still not told me about your dream," said Hazel in Elven, walking by her side.

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  "I do not want to."

  "Fine, if you prefer to stew, suit yourself. But I think it would help if you opened up."

  "All right. It was about... feathers. White feathers strewn on the ground, drenched in blood. Entire pieces of wings, cruelly ripped apart. More feathers, of a slightly different type, floating on top of what seemed to be a cesspit, slowly getting saturated with sludge and sinking to the bottom. I somehow felt I had to do something, to save them, cleanse them, heal them... but I did nothing."

  Her voice broke, and she fell silent. Would Hazel connect the feathers with Darlac, like she did? But there had to be more to it. Guelder could imagine Darlac being murdered (oh, she wished she couldn't), but not getting soiled and dragged down into the mire. She was certain that she was missing something obvious, and that oversight would cost her dear.

  "Ugh," said Hazel. "No wonder, though, considering what the spriggan did to Varn's rookery."

  "Do you always have to trivialise everything?"

  "Do you always have to regard every horror puffed out by your overdriven brain as divine revelation?" Hazel rolled their eyes. "Fine. If you want to delve deep and search for meaning where there is none, I tell you what this means. The loss of your innocence."

  "What?"

  Hazel stopped in their tracks and grabbed her by the wrists, looking deep into her eyes, so intensely that she forgot to look away.

  "You are growing into your role as a ruler, and starting to accept that it sometimes requires tough decisions. You are coming to the realisation that in order to get results, you have to rip out your little angel wings and get your hands dirty, up to your elbows, or even up to your heart."

  "No."

  "Be honest to yourself. Right now, you are preparing to violate the treaty with Varn in order to find and aid those Sisters – who are, by the way, unwelcome intruders in Varnhold's territory. Strictly speaking, you are working for Varnhold's enemies. You are using Varnhold's resources for your own purposes, living off its land, making arrangements for its inhabitants, bringing your own garrison into its capital. You behave like a conqueror, and as well you should. If we cannot find the baron and his people in time, and our current route plan makes me think we will not, you will have to take over this land. Unless you want it to go to the Tiger Lords, of course."

  Guelder tore herself out of their grip. She didn't really have arguments, and that angered her even more.

  "Any better idea? One that does not require me to drench myself in organic waste? Because if you have any, I am all ears!"

  Hazel flashed a reassuring smile.

  "Never mind, Guel. You know how fond the baron is of you. In the unlikely case we manage to find and save him, he will surely forgive you everything. And if we do not, he will be in no position to complain."

  "You are not helping, Hazel!"

  "My dearest baroness, you were born a predator. Embrace your nature. Take what you need, what you want, what you can."

  Guelder gritted her teeth, swallowing the tears of frustration. It was so not true. Why did they keep pushing this agenda?

  "Why did we stop?" called Amiri from behind. "Have you found a clue?"

  Embarrassed, Guelder sought out Pangur with her eyes, and found him studying a pile of horse dung teeming with flies. Following her gaze, Hazel let out an incredulous laughter.

  "What in the storms? ... Wait. Is that from a horse or a centaur?"

  "Seems like horse to me," said Guelder. "I do not think centaurs eat hay or grass."

  "Phew. Good. A pack of angry centaurs on our heels is the last thing we need right now."

  Soon enough, the perpetrator showed up. A bay horse, too graceful to be a carthorse, equipped with full tack but without a rider. Happy for the distraction from her dark thoughts, Guelder's mind reached out to establish a mental link.

  She failed miserably, even worse than she'd done with the owlbear on the monster hunt. Her advances bounced back from an overwhelming surge of horror as a sudden breeze carried her and Pangur's scent towards the animal. The horse flattened its ears, reared up with a frightened neigh, and galloped away, never looking back. At the last moment, Guelder managed to hold Pangur back from giving a chase.

  Brambles. What did I expect? I was born a predator. Even random riderless horses roaming the Varnhold countryside know exactly what that entails.

  There was nothing else to do but prowl through the Sepulchre of Forgotten Heroes and see if she couldn't sink her fangs into some clues inside.