The Silvered

Chapter Sixteen

WHILE SHEETS OVER NIGHTGOWNS wouldn’t attract any less attention than what the mages had been wearing, Danika assumed it would attract a different kind of attention and with her head through a hole in half a sheet and it hanging down both front and back like an extra long historic tabard, she could only hope people would fill in the blanks in the illusion on their own.

“Kirstin would be better at this,” Danika muttered as she jerked Captain Reiter’s knife through a piece of leftover sheet. Kirstin took the fashion chances. Kirstin never cared what people thought. Kirstin was dead. Kirstin had to die to convince the captain to free them from the nets. Kirstin died to free them from the nets. She swiped her palm over her cheeks. “There’s no way this will ever look like a shoe.”

“The Sisters wear white slippers,” Mirian told her dropping to one knee and wrapping a square of fabric around Danika’s right foot. Her nose inches from Danika’s leg, she tied the fake slipper in place with a long strip of sheet—around the ankle, down under the arch, back around the ankle. “And no one,” she added, moving to the left foot and cutting off whatever protest the captain had been about to make, “would go barefoot in the palace. Perception is important.”

“Getting out before we’re overrun by armed guards is more important,” Reiter grunted, lifting Jesine out of Tomas’ hold and up into the small room. It was crowded already, particularly since none of them would touch the…body…folded up over the chair. Fortunately, Jesine was small. Mirian held up a hand for another square and shuffled over to wrap Jesine’s feet.

“Forget it, Captain.”

Danika turned to see Reiter on one knee, holding out his hand to Stina, who, fortunately, looked amused as she added, “Get out of my way, I can manage on my own.”

When Danika translated, Reiter stood, hands spread, and backed to one side. She considered it a point in his favor that he stayed close enough to lend a hand if necessary.

It was definitely crowded with Stina in the small room. Danika moved closer to the edge, but maintained a hold on the billowing panels of purple fabric. Sheets weren’t known for traction. Glancing down as Tomas bent to boost Annalyse to the ledge, she saw a fan of light spill into the room below. Before she could speak, Annalyse threw herself forward and out of sight, Tomas right behind her.

There was a meaty thud and a groan, then Tomas reappeared dragging Adeline.

The triangle of light disappeared and Annalyse stared up at her, eyes wide, green flecks gleaming. “I hit her with the baton!”

“Good girl,” Stina called.

There was light enough to see Annalyse flush.

“Is she out?” Reiter demanded. He couldn’t look right at Tomas, Danika noticed. Imperials had such strange ideas about skin.

Tomas showed teeth. “Close enough.”

Annalyse needed even less help than Stina had, but then she was taller and almost fifteen years younger. Mirian, still on her knees, moved to her feet with the last two squares of sheet while behind her, Stina peered down at her own fake slippers and shook her head.

“Right, then.” The captain nodded at Tomas. “Let’s go.”

Tomas changed and trotted to the far end of the room. As he started to run, Danika wondered why it looked so familiar…

“The Pack! Tomas, stop!”

His nails raked the floor as he slid.

“Catch me, I’m coming down! Lord and Lady…” Danika spun around, to find the others staring at her. “…how could I have forgotten. The nets are off!” She turned back to the edge. “We have to get the Pack out!”

“Stop her!”

Danika’s foot was in the air when Captain Reiter threw an arm around her waist and dragged her back against his body. She called the wind, more than willing to knock them both down into the room where Tomas waited, but he held her with one arm and grabbed at the wall hangings with the other.

“Lady Hagen! Stop it!” Mirian grabbed her arm, and Danika got a close look at her eyes. None of the original color remained—only white and pupil—and the edges of her pupils were frayed. It was wrong and frightening. If this was what came of allowing the power to choose, the masters were right and she wanted no part of it.

When she flinched away, the wind stopped although she wasn’t positive she’d been the one to stop it.

“Captain Reiter will take you to safety. Tomas and I will free the Pack.”

“Tomas and you?” Fear sharpened her voice. “You’re children!”

Mirian released her arm and stepped back, bumping into Jesine. “And you have your child to think about plus another four. Sorry…” She glanced at Stina. “…five. You’re having twins.”

Stina rolled her eyes. “Oh, joy.”

“You could tell from touching her?” The gold flecks in Jesine’s eyes glittered.

“I didn’t mean to,” Mirian muttered. “It’s like first level metals by way of healing. Identify infant.”

“That’s not possible.”

“And yet…” She shrugged and turned her attention back to Danika, lip curled. Danika suddenly realized this girl would challenge her if it became necessary.

“They’ve been tortured and starved,” she growled. “What makes you think you can control them?”

“She has a better chance than you do.” Tomas said.

Reiter let his grip ease enough that Danika could look down at her brother-in-law. “Tomas, so help me, if you say she smells amazing…”

“She does. But she also has metal craft, and you don’t. They’re using silver to control them, right? I mean, logically, they have to be.”

Mirian’s mouth twitched at that although Danika saw nothing to smile about.

“You’d have to figure out the mechanics, if there’s even a way to get the silver off. Mirian wouldn’t. She can get rid of any silver, fast. And she’s…” He spread his hands although Danika wasn’t sure if words had failed him or he considered it blindingly obvious that Mirian was his Alpha. And probably Captain Reiter’s as well, although Danika doubted any of them had acknowledged it.

While age certainly had its place in Pack dynamics, in the end, position came down to power. Not only raw power, but also how that power was used. Ryder was…had been both strong and smart. Danika was the strongest Air-mage in Aydori. Mirian Maylin had made her way from Aydori to save the Mage-pack, even knowing she was the sixth mage Leopald searched for.

Danika stopped fighting the captain’s hold, and he allowed her to pull free. Meeting the girl’s eyes, forcing herself to focus on the white-on-white in spite of how uneasy it made her feel, she said, “I promised them.”

“Let me keep your promise for you.”

After a long moment, Danika tipped her head to one side. Behind her, Annalyse gasped, but the others were silent. Kirstin, who’d challenged and challenged and challenged, would have had something to say. Danika suddenly missed her so much she had to press both fists to her chest to hold in the pain.

Mirian looked past her to the captain and said, “I’m trusting you.”

“I’ll get them out.”

And Danika heard if it’s the last thing I do in Captain Reiter’s voice even if Mirian didn’t. Even if she was too young to realize that by helping them, by doing the right thing, he’d destroyed his own…

Mirian stepped off the edge.

Danika choked back a scream.

“What?” Mirian frowned up her as she floated gently to the lower level. “If I can float a leaf, I can logically float myself.”

“The Air-master said it was impossible.”

The frown became pique as she touched down. “Not to me.”

Stina snorted. “They’ll be fine.”

Mirian was close enough to Tomas when she landed that her skirt wrapped around his legs, the deep burgundy making his skin look even paler than usual. “Your clothes?”

“I’ll be more use in fur.”

“Told you you wouldn’t be in a jacket long enough to buy the expensive…” A sudden noise pulled her attention to the far end of the room. The guards weren’t banging on the door, not yet, but they’d definitely realized they couldn’t get it open. Reaching out, she touched Tomas’ shoulder, ran her hand down his arm, and finally laced their fingers together before she glanced up at the emperor’s nasty little room. “Where is he keeping the Pack?”

“Down the stairs,” Lady Hagen answered. “Turn left and go through a metal door to a row of cells.”

“Down the stairs behind the door that’s jammed shut and has increasingly frustrated armed guards lined up behind it?”

“Only two at this hour. They start the day by escorting us one by one to the water room.”

“Only two.” Although she couldn’t see faces, it wasn’t hard to find Captain Reiter. He was the only one up there not dressed head-to-toe in white. “Next time we do this, we’re coming up with a better plan.”

“Next time.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “Mirian, the…the Pack…” The smile was gone. “…you have to know, one of them, he ate the other mage.”

“It was Kirstin’s choice!” Lady Hagen protested.

Mirian didn’t want to know what the alternative had been.

“And she convinced him to do it,” Lady Hagen continued. “He was starving, but she convinced him to take her strength.”

“So he could what?” Mirian asked.

“Survive. Kirstin couldn’t live as a captive, and it’s not like she knew what the arrival of the sixth mage meant.”

Jake had told them to hurry. They hadn’t moved fast enough.

“And now,” Lady Hagen added, “he’s lived long enough for you to save him.”

“The emperor could have had him shot after we left.” Reiter spread his hands as Lady Hagen turned on him. “We don’t know.”

Kirstin’s decision sounded crazy to Mirian, but then she hadn’t been locked up by a madman. “It doesn’t matter if he’s been shot. Well, to him, obviously, but he wasn’t alone, was he? He wasn’t the only Pack held captive.”

“No.”

“Then thank you for the warning, Captain, but it changes nothing.” At the other end of the room, the guards’ attempt to open the door grew more vigorous. At her feet, the woman taken down by the baton groaned. Mirian bent and touched her. “Sleep.” She looked up again and couldn’t believe they were all still watching. She’d thought Lady Hagen, at least, had more sense. “Get them out, Captain!” Slipping her hand in Tomas’, she dropped her voice into his ear alone. “Leave the lantern and take me to the door.”

“You can’t…” He grunted when she shifted her grip and pinched the back of his hand. Pulling her close, he turned her toward the other end of the room and under the sound of the Mage-pack finally leaving said, “We have to talk about this.”

“You could leave with them.”

He snarled, but kept them moving. “We could leave with them.”

“No.” She thought about closing her eyes and seeing if it made any difference, then remembered they were crossing a dark room. Maybe her vision wasn’t as bad as she thought. Although it was bad. “I can’t see well enough to adjust to other people reacting up in the palace. If I go with them, I’d endanger their escape. I’d be responsible for the Mage-pack being recaptured. If we go with them, you’ll defend me instead of them. Of course, if you go with them on your own, you’ll be able to help protect them.”

“You can’t…How much can you see?”

That would be what he got his teeth into. “When we were standing by the lantern, I could see where you were, but not beyond you.”

“It’s dark. Really dark,” he added as though that made the difference.

“I’m afraid…” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m afraid that at the rate I’m losing vision, I’ll be blind before I finish what needs to be done.” She was impressed by how calm she sounded. Saying blind like it didn’t mean what it did.

“So floating down from that upper level wasn’t the sensible thing to do.”

“I guess not.”

“You were showing off for Danika.” He sounded amused.

“Shut up.”

He stopped, tugged her to a stop beside him. When Mirian stretched out her hand, she felt the wood of the door and the vibrations of the guards banging on the other side. It was either thick enough she couldn’t hear them shouting or they were trying to get through in complete silence. The latter was a little creepy.

Before she could decide what to do, Tomas wrapped a callused hand around her jaw and turned her face to his. “You don’t need to see beyond me.”

It took a moment to figure out what he meant. “Because you’ll always be there to be my eyes.” She didn’t mean for it to sound as much like a question as it did. This was absolutely not the time to be questioning…things.

But Tomas only laughed as though he had complete confidence in her ability to make the right decision. As though he didn’t know she was making it up as she went along. “Both metaphorically and actually.”

She rubbed her cheek against his hand. “Big words. I’m going to open the door and sleep these guards now.”

“You sure you can do it on purpose?”

Skin changed to fur under her hands as she poked him in the side where he was ticklish in both forms, well aware they were whistling in the dark.

The door had been saturated with water and the wood swollen to the point where the top of the doorjamb had buckled. Mirian moved the water out, then pushed the puddle far enough along the floor it would be out of their way.

Parting water. Moving water. Logically, it was still nothing more than second level water.

The door cracked and light from the guard’s lantern traced patterns around and across it. A boot pounded once. Twice…

Mirian jumped back as the door slammed open and shattered against the wall.

The guard at the top of the stairs managed to clear his weapon from the holster. It fired as he fell, the lead ball flattening against the stone. His weight bowled over the guard behind him. One of the two lanterns went flying, the other landed upright, not only unbroken, but still lit.

When Mirian could hear again, she heard boots against stone. Running. Running away from the bottom of the stairs. Lady Hagen had been wrong. There were three guards.

Tomas dove past her.

Mirian picked up the unbroken lantern and followed, feeling for each step, extinguishing the flames devouring spilled lamp oil as she went.

“Gunfire!” Danika jerked around, the others turning with her as though they were connected by strings.

Reiter had to move quickly to stop them from racing back. “Keep moving.”

They weren’t soldiers. They didn’t follow orders. They looked to Danika, not him.

“If it rouses the palace…”

“No one hears the sounds that come out of the north wing,” Reiter told her grimly. They locked eyes for a moment—he had to fight to look at her, not the blue flecks—then she nodded. Kirstin may not have screamed, but someone surely had.

As they reached the end of the short hall, he raised a hand and checked that the way was clear before beckoning the mages forward. Emerging into the larger Imperial shortcut, he was amazed by how much better they looked than they had up in the emperor’s rathole—where they’d looked like women wearing sheets over nightgowns. He started to think they might be able to pull this off.

“Da…Lady Hagen is weaving a glamour,” the redhead told him quietly, falling into step beside him. Reiter glanced past her. Danika’s lips moved as she walked and the edges of the robes…sheets, the edges of the sheets moved as though in a constant breeze. “She’s telling anyone who looks our way, that they’re seeing Sisters of Starlight. It’s very high level. She’s probably the only Air-mage alive who can…”

Her voice trailed off and Reiter knew she was thinking of Mirian. Who’d flown, or floated, when that wasn’t apparently possible. He thought of Mirian facing the wolf…thought of turning, of needing to be by her side, thought of the wolf already by her side…

“Get them out, Captain.”

He had his orders. He forced his thoughts back to the problem at hand. “If she can make a glamour, why waste time on a physical disguise?”

“She can only convince people to see what they want to see. When they look at us, they already think first of the Sisters of Starlight. Lady Hagen is smoothing out the edges.”

Given that he knew what they looked like and the glamour still affected him, Reiter was impressed. And uneasy. Out of the nets, the mages of Aydori could change a man’s thoughts.

“Get them out, Captain.”

She’d changed his.

Helped change his.

Had she used mage-craft?

Did it matter? He couldn’t leave the mages where they were, so he was either under the control of a mage barely out of her teens or he was a decent man. He knew what he wanted to believe. Needed to believe.

“Captain?”

Careful not to brush against the illusion, Reiter moved through the women, preferring to lead rather than herd. “Keep your eyes down. This glamour thing, it’s not hiding the mage marks.”

It was no darker at the bottom of the stairs than it had been at the top—an absence of light was an absence of light—but as Mirian stepped off the stairs onto the uneven slabs of stone, the darkness took on an almost physical presence. The circle of lantern light seemed both dimmer and smaller than it had a moment before.

Which was ridiculous.

It might have lessened the oppressive weight if she could have seen into the darkness, seen what it was hiding—in her admittedly limited experience, imagination added weight to the unknown—but she could see nothing past the line between dark and light. On the other hand, it felt damp and smelled terrible, and maybe she didn’t need to know.

She could hear Tomas, so she turned, lantern in her right hand, fingertips of her left running along the wall as she moved toward him.

“Mirian, he’s bolted it behind him.”

A steel door. Her fingers slid over the oil on the upper hinges. Down the crack between the steel and the stone.

A steel bolt as well.

“Get behind me.” She patted Tomas’ chest, a large pale blur in front of her. “I’ll try not to take the whole door down.”

“It’d be better if we could close it behind us,” he agreed, rubbing his shoulder against hers as he passed.

What did she know about steel? Iron tamed, made flexible. It didn’t burn, fire had helped make it. It didn’t break, violence had given it strength. She concentrated on the bolt. This steel had never been laid over a single anvil, pounded into shape. It had come from a foundry, a molten river poured into molds. Most relevantly, it was between her and where she needed to be.

She felt it sag, heard it drip. Pushed the door open.

For a moment, the howling was as solid a barrier as the door had been.

Then it stopped.

“Tomas, find out where he went.” When he growled, she added, “We need to know there’s not a division or two of the Imperial army on the way.”

He changed and went reluctantly, but he went. He’d been a Scout in the Hunt Pack. He knew better than she did the value of an advance warning.

Mirian pushed the door closed and softened one edge. Hopefully, as it hardened, it would seal to the stone. She felt along the wall and hung the lantern on a steel bracket, carefully trimming the wick to lessen the light. At this point, it made little or no difference to her, but the Pack she could hear waiting…breathing…whining…. had been kept in the dark and she didn’t want to blind them.

Too.

She didn’t want to blind them, too.

Reaching out both arms, she touched damp stone. A narrow hall.

“There’s a flight of stairs and another steel door.” Tomas’ hand brushed against hers. “It’s bolted, too.”

Mirian laid metal-craft on the air and sent it to fuse the bolt. She knew steel now. “What do you see?”

“Nine cell doors. Ask me what I smell.”

“Tomas.”

“There’s nine alive, one to a cell. There used to be more. There’s at least three bodies down here.”

She stumbled past him, felt her skirt brush fur as he changed. Both her palms slapped against rough metal. Iron. The cells might not be older than steel, but they were older than foundries. Iron was simpler. Changed less after being pulled from the ground before being put back into the ground…

The door sagged. Collapsed.

Mirian gagged at the smell. Heard scrambling. Heard Tomas growl. Felt something push against her leg, damp and foul even through the layers of fabric. She reached down, slowly slid her fingers over matted fur and open oozing wounds, felt the silver before she touched it. It wanted to slide away as she removed it, so she let it go, let it run down a stinking drain. As long as the palace stood, no one would ever use it again.

She had to swallow before she could speak and even then she didn’t dare unclench her teeth. “Convince him to change, Tomas. He needs to heal.”

As she moved to the next cell, the howling started again.

They’d had to move out of the straight lines of the shortcuts twice. Once to cross a wide, three-story hall where sunlight fell from the upper windows to gild the mosaic floor. Once to skirt the back wall of a small room that held two enormous ceramic vases and nothing else. They’d passed servants—looking harried—and courtiers—looking supercilious—and neither seemed surprised to see an Imperial army officer leading four women dressed in torn sheets through the hidden halls of the palace. Hands clasped in front of her, Danika murmured the words of the glamour over and over.

She heard Stina say something quietly in Aydori.

Jesine brushed past her to walk by Captain Reiter’s side. “You’re leading us deeper into the palace, Captain.”

Earth-mages of Stina’s power didn’t get lost.

“Yes, I am.”

“How do we get out by going farther in?”

“You’ll just have to trust me.”

Mirian Maylin trusted him. Danika wasn’t certain she did. Had it been as early as she’d believed it to be, she might have risked walking away from him, having Stina lead them through a nearly empty palace and out into the predawn streets of Karis. But the palace was full. The streets would be full. And the captain had brought them the artifact to remove the nets.

And Mirian Maylin trusted him. This was not the time to second-guess her submission to the younger mage.

The captain paused at the end of the hall and beckoned them in close. “From here on, we’ll be out in public. We go straight to the Sun Gallery and then left, out into a courtyard. There’s a balloon there. You’re going to steal it.”

“A balloon? With basket large to carry all?” To Danika’s surprise, Annalyse seemed to know what she was talking about even if her Imperial wasn’t entirely fluent.

“It’s the emperor’s personal balloon. It’s not so much a basket as a boat.”

“And the aeronauts? We steal them, too?”

“No.” He nodded at Danika. “You have an Air-mage.”

Annalyse frowned. “Should work, but…”

“No buts. It has to work. I’ll go out and…”

The elderly man who slipped into the hidden hall saw them first, and his annoyed expression turned to one of bland welcome.

Politician, Danika thought as she murmured. “See Sisters of Starlight.”

He stepped to the far side of the hall, inclined his head, said, “Enjoy your visit, Sisters.” And then he froze. “Captain Reiter?”

“Lord Coving.”

Danika risked a glance at the captain’s face. He wasn’t happy. Two of the other courtiers they’d passed had called him by name, and it hadn’t seemed to matter. What was different about Lord Coving?

“What are you doing, Captain?”

“Helping Major Meritin, sir.”

“But why take the Sisters through the…” Danika could feel the weight of his gaze. Feel the glamour slipping. She didn’t know what reason Lord Coving had to suspect they weren’t as they seemed, but she couldn’t hold him. “These aren’t…Are these?” He drew in a deep breath and she felt the glamour break. “Are you out of your mind, Captain?”

The captain’s lip curled. “Funny you should ask that, sir.”

“This is treason! In fact, this is more than treason, this is stupidity! His Majesty knows the sixth mage is in the palace!”

“How…?”

“The flowering vine. According to your report, she did that same trick back in Bercarit! His Majesty was just informed of it and is on his way to the north wing where he is expecting to find her captive after trying to free the mages. When he finds the mages are already gone, he’ll turn his guards loose. He’ll send them out into the rest of the palace regardless of what he has agreed! These are not men I want among the citizens of the empire! These are…” He paused, glaring at Danika and then the others. “Where is she?”

“We were not the only captives, Your Grace!” Danika snapped.

The honorific startled him. Which was why she’d used it. “The abominations? She’s freeing the abominations?”

“You know this is wrong,” Captain Reiter growled. “You sent your son away to protect him because you know it’s wrong. This is your chance to do the right thing. You don’t have to help…”

“Help?”

“…just look the other way. You’re good at that.”

“And die beside you? I don’t think so. You’re a dead man, Captain. A dead man.”

As he opened his mouth—Danika assumed he intended to give the alarm—the captain charged toward him. Jesine was faster. Lord Coving hadn’t been told she was harmless, but she was small and beautiful, even in torn sheets. More importantly, the empire had very few mages left and none of power. He didn’t try to stop her.

When she touched his forehead, he frowned.

“Sleep.”

The frown smoothed out, and he crumpled to the ground.

Danika thought the captain might try and catch him, but he didn’t look very upset when the older man’s head cracked against the floor.

“There’s nowhere to hide him. If he’s found, how easy will it be to wake him?”

Jesine knelt and checked Lord Coving’s pulse, ever a Healer-mage even to their enemies. “He won’t wake for some hours, no matter what they do.”

“With luck, they’ll think his heart gave out. Good work.” He nodded to Jesine who flashed dimples up at him—Danika suspected she wasn’t even aware she’d done it. “Although I was looking forward to punching the hypocritical old shitbag. We’re just lucky he was alone; he isn’t usually.”

“We need to warn Mirian.”

“About the emperor?” Reiter looked back down the hall and worked out how fast he could get to the north wing. “We need to get you out of here first.”

Mirian rested her forehead against the iron door of the last cell, feeling the rough layer of rust against her skin. She’d lost the glow of the lantern three doors in. She’d thrown up twice, and the last time she’d been this tired and still awake, she’d just run the skin off her heels. Behind her, lying on the damp stone were eight scarred and starving wolves. She couldn’t see them, but she’d touched the ripple of ribs and spines, hollow cheeks, corded throats in the moment they spent in skin before fur covered them again.

They’d changed to heal, but they wouldn’t or couldn’t stay in skin.

They whined. They twitched. They snarled. They snapped at nothing. They scrabbled at the stone unable to stop themselves.

Seven men—ages hidden by dirt and dried blood. One boy. Maybe six. Maybe younger. He’d been in a cell with his father’s rotting, three-legged corpse—although all four legs were in the cell. When she dissolved his collar, he’d changed and thrown himself into her arms, blood seeping from wounds on his neck and between his legs. It wasn’t until Tomas peeled the boy off her, both of them murmuring meaningless words of comfort, and he’d checked the wounds that they realized he’d been surgically castrated.

That was the second time she’d thrown up.

Tomas changed with him, and changed back with him, and that was enough to stop the bleeding, open wounds becoming twisting ridges of scar tissue. He’d whimpered once or twice, but had said nothing. He wouldn’t tell Tomas his name.

There were no women.

Mirian suspected there were no women among the Pack for the same reason there were no men among the Mage-pack. Suspected. She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know.

Now, Mirian could hear banging against the door of the last cell. She didn’t need Tomas to tell her this was the captives’ Alpha. She didn’t need anyone to tell her that this was the wolf Reiter had warned her about. The wolf who’d eaten Kirstin Yervick.

Eaten.

They didn’t fetishize the dead in Aydori like they did in some cultures. She’d remembered reading that in Cafren they built small ornate houses for bodies, shared by the corpses of whole families. In Aydori, bodies were returned to earth in the land around the Lady’s Groves. Historically, the Pack had eaten the hearts of their enemies, but in this modern world, even Alpha battles no longer ended in death.

There were overwrought novels written of extreme circumstances where the dying had said, Let my body keep you alive.

Apparently, Kirstin Yervick had read them, too.

Would he be more or less likely to eat her? He’d already done it once, so any social barriers against it had already been broken. But he wouldn’t be as hungry…

“Mirian?”

“I know.”

They didn’t have time for her to settle it all in her head.

At this point, moving air from place to place made no difference in the smell, so she sucked as little as possible in past her teeth and rested her fingertips against the cell door.

Somehow, once the door was open, she didn’t think the wolf behind it would sit quietly with his head in her lap while she dealt with his collar. But then she hadn’t touched the silver in Tomas’ wound when she’d drawn it to her, so, logically, she had no need to actually touch the silver in the collars. It took only a moment to find the metal and a moment more to deal with it. To have it slough off his neck—out of his neck—and down the drain.

Mirian took a deep breath, gagged, and got rid of the door.

Expecting his charge, she managed to keep from cracking her head against the floor as he knocked her down and scrambled over her. Still in fur, he ran up the stairs. Snarling, he threw himself at the bolted door.

She dragged herself up onto her elbows as Tomas raced past, up onto her knees as he reached the top of the stairs, and onto her feet just barely in time to move out of the way as the two came back down in an interlocked mess of growling and snapping teeth. From the sound of the impact, Tomas had landed on the bottom, limiting the damage to the starved wolf’s prominent bones.

He fought like a crazed animal. Tomas had not only strength and speed, but reason on his side.

The fight quickly became toenails scrabbling against stone and Tomas growling with a mouth full of fur. Mirian inched forward until her boots touched something solid then she dropped carefully to her knees, bent forward, and moved enough air to wrap her scent around the tangled muzzles. “You’re going to change when he lets you go,” she said. “You’re going to change because you need to heal. Now, Tomas.”

The matted fur under her hand turned to greasy skin.

“Give me…” His voice was so rough she could barely make out the words. “Give me…a reason…to live.” Skin turned back to fur, rising and falling under Mirian’s hand as he panted.

She heard Tomas grunt as a small body dove back into his arms.

They could go back the way they’d come in. Get the men up into the palace. Sleep a few tourists. Get them clothes. Put them in the guards’ clothes if it came to it. Get out the north gate and find a place to hide until dark. Feed them. If she had to sleep half of Karis to get them out, she would. That was the plan and there was nothing in it she couldn’t do. Hadn’t done—sleeping, stealing, feeding, sleeping again.

At the top of the stairs, the guards worked to free the bolt. Guards who’d locked a child in a cell with his dead father.

They had guns. Silver shot.

They thought they knew what they’d be facing.

Revenge seemed like the best reason she could give him right now.

They were almost across the Sun Gallery before they ran into a problem. Thanks to Danika’s constant murmur as well as the Sisters’ reputation for aggressive solicitation, the crowds peering at the wall of glass, at the golden tiles, at the golden Sun, parted before the five of them and closed up behind them, willingly blind.

Unfortunately, there were always priests in this part of the palace.

Reiter saw a smiling face perched above that ridiculous court collar closing the distance between them, clearly intending to intercept them before they reached the open doors to the courtyard. He sped up as much as he dared, but a soldier leading four Sisters of Starlight out of the palace at a dead run wouldn’t help them remain unseen. With luck, this particular priest had never had contact with the charitable…

The priest’s smile turned to a puzzled frown. Puzzled turned angry.

Seemed their luck had run out.

Although not entirely, as the priest chose to grab the redhead’s arm before he yelled, “Impos…”

She tapped his forehead. “Sleep.”

If they hadn’t just been so thoroughly screwed, Reiter would have found his expression amusing. “Can you lot run in your condition?” he asked as the priest slowly crumpled to the tiles.

“Our condition?” When he gestured at her stomach, the redhead narrowed her eyes. “We walked out of Aydori in our condition. We were thrown into dungeon cells in our condition. Danika was tortured in our condition. We can run.”

“Good. About that,” he added when her eyes narrowed even further. Far too close already, a trio of priests hurried toward their fallen comrade. “Run!”

A pair of soldiers flanked the courtyard door. Reiter shoved the redhead left. As the soldier on the right moved to intercept, Reiter drove a fist into his stomach and, as he folded forward gasping, gave him a hard shove out the door and down the four broad stairs. A mass of vines came up through the cracks between the pavers and held him in place. Although Reiter knew they couldn’t afford the time, he turned to stare at the brown-eyed mage.

She shrugged as she ran by him. “Like weeds, those. Leopald’s gardeners is idiots.”

Two small fountains erupted with force enough to blow a stone lion to pieces. People screamed and scattered. Roses grew to hedges. They had a clear run all the way to the balloon.

There were Shields stationed on the palace roof, but it was a big roof and they were in an interior courtyard. Reiter grabbed the downed soldier’s weapons and ran to catch up, an itch between his shoulder blades.

“Ready!”

As the guard on the other side of the door sheared the bolt, Mirian dissolved the hinges then reached out and called every piece of silver she could feel. She let the metal splash against the other side of the door, then reached deep for her last reserves, blowing door and silver out to slam into the mass of men. As Tomas and the eight adults charged past her, she lifted the boy onto her hip—skin and bones and light enough that, as exhausted as she was, his weight meant nothing.

It seemed reasonable to assume that the light making her eyes water had been intended to blind the freed Pack as they attacked out of darkness. Bad planning. The Pack depended on their noses more than their eyes. Mirian could smell nothing over the stink of the boy in her arms.

But she could hear.

Wet tearing. Crunch of bone. A yelp. Even disarmed, the guards weren’t helpless and only Tomas was at anything near full strength.

When the screaming stopped, the sounds grew wetter. She was about to set the boy down.

Then stopped.

Someone howled—it didn’t sound like Tomas.

It bounced off walls and ceilings and floors, then faded and turned to the sound of nails against tile as the pack raced away.

“Tomas?”

Of course, he’d gone with them. Or after them.

Mirian set the boy on his feet, pried his hands off her skirt, took his left in her right, felt his right grip her thumb. She could see shadows on the floor that might have been guards’ bodies, but, given the medieval dungeons already in use, they could have been pit traps. “I can’t see.” She could tell herself it was because she’d come out of darkness into bright light, but she knew it had more to do with the mage-craft she’d used freeing the Pack. “You need to direct me around obstacles. Can you do that?”

He whined and hung on.

She’d been speaking Aydori. When she repeated herself in Imperial, he sniffed and began pulling her carefully away from the door.

When her foot caught under what felt like an arm, she kicked it out of her way.

The boy understood Imperial. The ninth freed Pack had asked for a reason to live in Imperial. Mirian hadn’t noticed because she’d been speaking it for days. The emperor had not only encouraged Imperial citizens to kill and skin Imperial citizens, but he personally had them imprisoned and tortured.

He was making war not only on Aydori, but on his own people.

As the boy tugged her toward the sound of snarling, she ignored the way her boots slid on the wet floor.

“Mirian!” Tomas grabbed her arm and pulled her into a room so bright she thought for a moment she could see.

The aeronauts watched wide-eyed as four women ran past them, torn sheets flapping. Reiter grabbed the arms of the young areonaut he’d spoken to earlier and yanked her out of Danika’s way.

“They’re not allowed on the balloon! No one is!” She twisted in his grip. “His Imperial Majesty’s orders!”

Danika and the redhead were already on board, ignoring the aeronauts demanding they come down. The brown-eyed mage was nearly at the top of the half dozen stairs, an aeronaut hanging off the lower edge of her sheet. While waiting her turn, the youngest seemed to be causing more havoc with the fountains, spraying them toward the doors, keeping people inside. Smart.

“Look at me!” Reiter tightened his grip, pulling the young woman’s attention from the balloon. “You don’t want to get blamed for what’s about to happen, and I don’t want to hurt you. Go!”

“But they’re…”

“You can’t stop them from taking it.”

Her eyes widened. She seemed more indignant than angry. “It’s not that easy!”

“You told me the balloon is always kept ready, in case the emperor decides to go up.”

“Yeah, but…”

“It’s a big bag of air.” He glanced at Danika now staring up into the balloon. “Trust me, it’s that easy for them.”

Four ropes hit the ground, the balloon surged up against the four remaining. The brown-eyed mage grinned, chips flying from the mahogany railing as she wielded the ax.

Maybe it was the grinning. Maybe it was the ax. The aeronaut jerked free of Reiter’s grip, put two fingers in her mouth, whistled a complex pattern, and ran. The others ran with her. One held a length of sheet.

The youngest, the Water-mage, was on board now.

Two ropes remaining.

He heard the shot the same time he saw the musket ball kick up dirt. The first man to the edge of the roof hadn’t taken the time to aim. Probably wasn’t entirely certain what he was supposed to aim at.

“Captain!”

He turned to find Danika staring down at him.

“Are you coming?”

He hadn’t…

He’d assumed…

He didn’t even know their names. He knew her name and Kirstin’s name, the name of the dead mage, but then they were redheaded, brown-eyed, and youngest.

“If you’d rather die, Captain Reiter, I won’t stop you.”

Another two shots. Not from the roof. There were Shields fighting their way out through the spraying water. He couldn’t get back to Mirian. But he had…they had pulled Shields from all over the palace and created one flaming fuck of a diversion for her. She’d be able to slip the Pack out in the chaos. Hide them in clothing as she’d hidden Tomas.

Reiter had been a soldier most of his life. He’d always expected to die fighting for something he believed in. From the moment he saw Mirian in the square, he’d known he was a dead man. He hadn’t actually thought there was another option.

As the balloon broke the final two tethers and surged up into the air, he ran up the stairs and launched himself at the break in the railings. Slamming down on his elbows, he bit his tongue, swallowed blood, and managed to get onto his feet in time to see the roof of the palace fly by.

In time to see two men with raised weapons. In time to dismiss one and identify the other as Corporal Hare.

Hare had been one of the first handed a musket with the new rifled barrel. Greater accuracy over a greater distance, and Hare had already been one of the best shots Reiter’d ever known.

The balloon was basically a big bag of air. Put a hole in it and it was a big bag.

Reiter raised his stolen musket to his shoulder. He might be able to distract…

The sandbag hanging by the redhead’s hip exploded, spraying sand. She stared down at the mess, then up at the balloon. “He missed!”

“No.” Reiter lowered his musket without taking a shot. On the roof, Hare took his time reloading. The wind whistled by, and Danika carried them out of range. “He hit exactly what he aimed at.”

When Mirian blew the door open, one of the guards had tried to run. Tomas, less distracted than the others by the rich meaty scent of fresh blood on his muzzle, had slammed him to the floor, closed his jaws around the back of his neck and crushed his spine. By the time he spun back to the mass of bodies by the door, growling low in his chest, the screaming had stopped and the feeding frenzy had begun.

Not unexpected.

The guards didn’t smell like Pack, or power.

He’d been warned, entering the Hunt Pack, that this happened in war. He was the younger Lord Hagen, and he’d sworn to himself he’d never…

They smelled like meat.

The guards had taken strength away. They could give it back.

Then Nine—he wouldn’t change again and tell Tomas his name, if he even remembered it, so Nine—Nine had lifted his head. Lowered it. Scrubbed his muzzle on the shoulder he straddled. Lifted it again, and howled.

By the time the howl had faded, the whole Pack was running.

A man.

Over the scents of metal, and death, and piss, and lamp oil, Tomas had been able to catch the very faint scent of a man. Not one of the lingering scents of the many men and women who’d been through these halls. Fresh. A man standing somewhere close. Waiting.

Whoever he was, he was more than merely a man to the freed Pack.

He’d been enough to pull them from food.

Not far down the hall, Nine had turned, dove through what looked like an open cage with gears and pulleys up above and chains running down through holes in the floor, and into a white-tiled room.

“So you got past the guards.” The man standing alone on the upper level had peered down through the bars into the room. He looked short, but that might have been the angle. When Tomas, caught up in the attack on this final enemy, had nearly sunk his teeth into the toe of a glossy boot, he’d danced back, but he’d seemed pleased rather than frightened or angry.

Then Mirian’s scent had brought Tomas up onto two feet. Attention split between the enemy and the Pack, he’d gone to the hall to get her.

He lifted the boy up into his arms as she walked carefully into the room, adding bootprints to the smeared red pattern on the floor. The boy nuzzled up against his throat, soft tongue licking along the line of his jaw.

“Stop it.” Tomas reached across with his free hand and pushed the boy’s head away.

The boy whined and snapped at Tomas’ fingers, trying to push his face back to…

To the blood.

“Fine. But no biting.”

The Pack, exhausted, sat panting. And twitching. Except for Nine. Nine paced. Back and forth. Through the resting wolves. He brushed against Mirian’s skirt hard enough to leave a dark, wet stain behind but not so hard she stumbled, so Tomas let it go. He understood the need to move. The frustration at not being able to take this final enemy.

He sucked blood off his teeth, shifted the boy to his other hip, and leaned closer to Mirian’s ear. “Twelve o’clock. Up about fifteen feet.” Her chin lifted. “Alone. No visible weapons, but he smells like power.”

“Mage?” she asked quietly.

“No. But sort of similar. Not a guard. Expensive clothes. Very expensive boots.”

The man looked at Mirian like she was his. Tomas growled. The boy in his arms echoed it. Nine picked it up and then, one by one, the other seven. It grew, filled the room, until Mirian said, “Enough.”

“Fascinating.” He smiled like a schoolteacher Tomas had particularly disliked. “So you’re my sixth mage, are you?”

His sixth mage? Tomas tensed. The boy whined.

Mirian’s lips pulled back off her teeth. “Ignore it. Reiter said the emperor was insane.”

“Are you encouraging her to use mage-craft against me, abomination?” The emperor rocked back on his heels. Tomas wanted to snap the approving smile right off his smarmy face. “Well, that’s definitely a good idea, credit where credit is due and all that, but she’s already making the attempt. I can feel all six of my protective artifacts heat up. Actually…” Reaching into his trouser pocket, he pulled out a ceramic disk and slipped it into his jacket. “That was getting a little uncomfortable. Now…” Even at this distance, his eyes were so brilliant a blue Tomas thought for a moment he had mage marks. And mage marks on this man would be wrong for so many reasons. “According to the report from Abyek, you can use—and I think it’s fairly and unfortunately obvious why I say use and not control, isn’t it?—fire, air, water, metal, and earth. And then Tardford gave us healing.” His smile stretched into broad approval. “Six in one. As happens far too often I’m afraid, it seems the Soothsayers were misinterpreted. You’re the mage I was looking for all along. And let me tell you, understanding that makes it a lot easier to accept that the others have escaped. There is, of course, still the unborn child beginning it all to deal with, of course, but if that’s not a factor currently, I’m sure we can arrange things. Although, this time…” He wagged a finger at Nine who snarled and took another leap at the ledge. “…we’ll do it scientifically.”

“Is he lying?” Tomas asked, not bothering to hide the question from the emperor.

“About mage-craft having no effect on him?” Mirian tucked a strand of hair back behind her ear. “No.”

Nine set up for another run. Tomas growled, and he settled, reluctantly, by Mirian’s other side.

“First, why would I lie? Second,” the emperor continued as Tomas soothed the boy, “thank you for keeping my property from damaging itself, and third…”

He opened his hand. Nine jumped for the flash of gold. Missed.

Mirian felt the net snug up against her scalp, thought about hats, and bit back a giggle. It didn’t hurt this time, but that was possibly because she couldn’t feel anything but tired.

“You didn’t think I only had the original six, did you?” The emperor smiled broadly. “This is the artifact we used for primary testing back when we first discovered the cabinet in the Archive, so I know this one, unlike the one you wore before, is entirely functional.”

It didn’t feel functional, it felt old.

Mage-craft had been wound through and around the gold links—a twisted combination of healing and metals.

Gold. Soft. Malleable. Never tarnished. She’d seen coins of red gold once from Talatia in the Southern Alliance at her father’s bank.

“Mirian, there’ll be more guards soon.”

“I know.”

The guards would have silver, and she couldn’t…

She knew the gold. Not as well as she’d come to know silver, but well enough. Except…she had nothing left. She was only still standing because she was too stubborn to fall over.

The emperor said the Mage-pack had escaped. That was good.

But now he had Tomas. That was bad.

“What is wrong with your eyes? They’re white, aren’t they? At first I thought it was just the room because, in all honesty it can be just a little overwhelming—the tile, the lights—but no, they’re white. No color to them at all. Wait, I’ve read about that. Hang on.” He lifted a hand as if he actually thought the gesture would hold them in place. “I’m sure I’ll remember in a moment. I know it was an old scroll. Very old…”

“Used to be, everyone had to do a bit of everything to survive, but civilization means specialists because suddenly everything’s so bleeding complicated with foundries and gaslights and brass buttons, it takes all a person has to learn how to do just one thing and if everything’s that complicated, then mage-craft can’t be simple…

“You need to be a river, not a bucket. Way I heard it, the power is everywhere, but the mage has to open themselves and say fuck these bullshit rules.”

She had essentially blinded herself with the limited power in her bucket. In this room, in this light, she could see shapes, although she had to trust those shapes were her Pack. She felt as though she were looking through a series of overlapping veils. If she turned her head quickly, the veils shifted and she almost thought she saw Tomas watching her.

What would unlimited power do? How many more veils would it add? What else would she lose? Sight. Hearing. Touch…

Life?

“Mirian?”

Running off to rescue the Mage-pack from the empire might have been a bit crazy, sure, but she didn’t want to die.

Or lose Tomas and the boy and the eight others in their broken Pack.

Her life weighed against ten lives.

If completely opening herself to power did kill her, at least she wouldn’t have to live with having failed them.

So, that decided, how did she find the power Gryham had heard about?

She knew how it felt lying dormant—trapped, heavy, not fitting in the skin that should be yours. She’d known that for years.

She knew how it felt being used—like a breeze, a cool drink of water, warm earth underfoot, knowing the parameters of your body, silver running silken. Although that was more recent.

Oh.

Reaching out, she found Tomas’ hand and squeezed it. There was no time to explain, but if the worst happened, she hoped he’d remember and understand. “Fuck these bullshit rules.”

“Mirian!”

Gold ran down her cheek and caught against the collar of her dress.

When she screamed, the Pack howled.

When she turned toward him, her eyes gleamed white from rim to rim.

Her body felt like it dissolved.

It hurt.

Then re-formed.

That hurt more.

“Mirian!”

She turned toward his voice. She could see the way the air moved over and around him. Defining him. She could see his shape in the air, see him. He was mostly water. She hadn’t known that. She could see all of them for the first time. Faces. Expressions. Scars. For all the detail, there were no colors; it was all shades of gray. All but the silver fur that marked where the Pack had been collared—that blazed.

Mirian pulled her hand from Tomas’ grip and stroked the backs of two fingers over his cheek. The movement shot pain down her arm as her new body figured out what she wanted it to do. The contact burned, then faded to a dull throb. “Don’t look so worried. I’m…” In all honesty, she wasn’t sure what she was.

What else she was.

She was Mirian Maylin.

“You can see me?”

“I can.” She rubbed her face against his shoulder, savoring the burn as each new bit of skin settled. Turning toward the other end of the room, she rose on the air until she was level with the emperor. His gray body gleamed with points of blue and green and red and brown and gold and indigo. No silver. No one had tortured him. She pulled the iron rings from the walls, formed it into spears, and sent them through the bars.

They flattened against a flare of indigo and dropped to the floor.

“Amazing! But that’s metal-craft and I told you, I’m protected. You can’t blow me over, you can’t move all the water out of my body, you can’t wrap vines around me, or bury me, you can’t light me on fire, you can’t put me to sleep.” He hauled out the artifacts as he spoke. Mirian saw them as their power rather than actual physical things. She could see how that power protected them.

“You can’t hurt me.”

She tried anyway.

She couldn’t set him on fire, so she cracked the walls—the tiles were originally clay and threw the metal from the pipes…

…the water in the pipes.

Air spun around him.

He didn’t fall. He didn’t sleep.

He was right.

Exactly right.

She let everything fall and said, “That artifact that protects you from Healing is limited. It only stops me from putting you to sleep.”

The emperor smiled disarmingly from within a knee-high circle of debris and rubbed the gold light between his thumb and forefinger. “Well, yes, but healing is hardly aggressive now, is it? You can’t exactly heal me to death.”

Mirian remembered the rabbit and smiled back at him.

This time, no one was close enough to break his neck. He died thrashing, fingernails digging into his face, heels drumming against the floor.

It didn’t take long. She hoped he was terrified. She hoped it hurt.

Her Pack stood and watched silently as she rode the air back to the floor.

Tomas watched as she made her way through them—stroking shoulders, heads, ears, calming them, if only for the moment, with her touch. He was as silent as the rest.

“Tomas?”

“You smell…There isn’t…words. There aren’t words.” He reached out and stroked her cheek with two fingers. A mirror of what she’d done. Only her fingers hadn’t been trembling.

“We need to leave.”

“How?”

“This way.” Mirian meant to use the whirlwind to punch a clean hole through to the outside. She could feel the place where the weight of the palace no longer rested on the earth. When the dust settled, the north wing ended at the toes of her boots.

People screamed in the distance. Behind her, her Pack twitched and snarled and snapped at nothing. If anyone had been in the north wing when it fell, she wouldn’t mourn them.

“You didn’t mean to do that, did you?” Tomas sounded slightly amused. Or almost hysterical. Mirian wasn’t sure which.

“Not exactly, no. Still…” Her body didn’t seem sure of how to take a deep breath. “…no point in wasting it. Let’s go.”

“Where?” Still holding the boy, Tomas grabbed her arm and pulled her back from the edge. “We can’t take them to Aydori. They’re…” He was about to say broken, she could see it in his eyes, but he shook his head and said, “The boy’s the only one who can stay in skin for more than a moment or two.”

The gray light that defined the boy had become muted. His head lolled on Tomas’ shoulder, his eyes barely open. And she still didn’t know how to heal. “Times are changing,” she said slowly, touching the boy’s fur, watching dirt and dried blood flake away from her fingertips. “Science and reason are taking over. Soon everyone will have a chance to abuse power, not just those given it by an accident of birth.”

“You won’t abuse your power.”

“Maybe not, but a sensible person would learn to control it. I need to find someone who can help. Help me. Help them.” Everyone needed help except…

“Don’t say it. Where you go, I go.” His teeth were bared. “Tell me to stay behind and I’ll follow.”

Mirian found it more comforting than she could say that Tomas had known what she was thinking. She barely recognized the inside of her head. Still…“You could go home, Tomas. To your family. I’m as much a throwback to an earlier time as the emperor was, but you can go home.”

He shook his head as another slab of masonry fell from the part of the palace still standing and crashed into the ruin of the north wing. “We’re Pack. Where you go, I go. And Reiter said the emperor was insane, so you’re nothing like him.”

Mirian glanced up at the body. Had he always been insane? How had it started? Said, “All right, then. We’re going to Orin.”

Reiter put the newspaper down and stood as Lady Hagen came into the room. It had taken a while, but he’d learned to think of her using her title. They weren’t friends.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Captain.” She lowered herself into the wing chair on the other side of the small table and nodded at the newspaper as he took his seat. “Are you back in the news?”

“Not this week.”

For the first few months, the Imperial papers brought into Aydori had featured him prominently. Reading the stack sequentially, Lord Coving had declared him traitor, accused him of releasing the abominations and the mages, of turning both sets of captives loose to destroy the palace and the Imperial government. It was only due to Lord Coving’s leadership that things hadn’t gotten worse than they were. He called for Reiter to be dragged back to the empire to pay for his crimes. He even suggested that the ancient traitor’s death be reinstated in this one case, and Reiter, when captured, be staked out in the sun. In the next issue, which looked to have been a rushed second printing later that same day, he accused Reiter of killing the emperor. In the next, it turned out that one of the scientists who researched in the north wing had found the body and took her findings straight to the newspapers. She had photographs. Reiter almost admired the adherence to scientific principles that led to her setting up a camera after finding the emperor’s body at the edge of the wreckage before raising an alarm. She not only had photographs of the emperor’s body, but files documenting everything that had been happening in the north wing. In later issues, the newspapers printed engravings based on the photographs—both of the emperor’s body and of the experiments he’d had performed. Lord Coving accused her of being bought. Then one of the men who’d been guarding the Mage-pack came forward and supported her story.

“Bruised-thumb!” Reiter had no idea how Lady Hagen had recognized that feature in the engraving, but she’d been pleased by the guard’s sudden discovery of a conscience.

After that, accusations flew thick and fast. The newspapers had to resort to broadsheets to keep up.

What had the politicians known? And when? Why had they done nothing about it? Adeline Curtain was found and interviewed and became a bit of a celebrity. The emperor’s doctor came forward and even the Prelate took his moment in the sun, covering his ass with meticulously reported bullshit, rescinding the declaration of abomination. The church and the court expressed sympathy for all Imperial citizens murdered during this horrible loss of grace, but refused to prosecute their murderers because they had been, after all, doing nothing illegal at the time, the emperor’s word being law.

In the end, Lord Coving sat in one of the five seats that made up the Board of Regents for the young prince—who would not be declared emperor in fact until his fifteenth birthday—and Captain Sean Reiter was still a traitor under sentence of death by more conventional means should he ever set foot in the Kresentian Empire again.

Which seemed like as good a reason as any for him to work to keep the Aydori border secure. Through the influence of Lady Hagen and the others, Reiter found himself in charge of building a garrison for Aydori in the meadow by the bridge where he’d spoken to General Denieu. His official title was consultant. He wasn’t actually in the Aydori army—he doubted they’d ever trust him enough for that, nor was he sure he wanted to put on the uniform—but because Lady Hagen and the others still called him captain, so did everyone else.

During border negotiations, Major…no, Colonel Halyss had demanded he be turned over. The new Pack Leader and her council had refused, and the colonel hadn’t mentioned it again.

The empire had withdrawn to the new Imperial Province of Pyrahn and were busy reinforcing the new Imperial border. Reiter doubted it would move during the life of this emperor.

Of late, he’d been in the Aydori papers more than the Imperial.

The Imperial papers had other stories to cover.

Reiter rubbed his finger over an engraving of a young woman flying above a pair of wolves. He still lost the track of conversations if the people around him spoke too fast or spoke over each other, but he was fluent enough in Aydori to speak one on one. “There is a story about the Ghost Pack visiting Verdune.”

“Lord and Lady.” Lady Hagen sighed, both hands laced over the curve of her belly. She was due soon. In the empire a woman of her rank would have left public life, but that wasn’t how it was done in Aydori. “What have they done now?”

“They attacked a money lender in the night. Gave his money to the poor.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Verdune is too far into the empire. They wouldn’t have left Orin for something so foolish. They’re being blamed for things they couldn’t possibly have done.”

There were a number of things they had done crossing the empire. In the early days, the stories of a flying woman and a pack of wolves with silver markings had fought with treason for the front pages of newspapers. They’d stopped a runaway coach, saving five. The wolves had herded the townspeople to safety while the woman put out a spreading fire. They’d rescued a flock of sheep from a spring flood. They’d found a little boy down a well and, according to his mother’s interview in the paper, he’d cried for three days wanting the silver doggies to come back. They released two donkeys from the millstone they’d been tied to their entire lives and flattened the mill. Reports varied on what had then happened to the donkeys. In more than one, they’d been eaten.

The Ghost Pack probably hadn’t flogged a foundry owner, known to take advantage of those young and attractive and dependent on him for a living, then chased him into a manure pit. It had happened close enough to the line from Karis to Orin it couldn’t be ruled out, but it was the first of the stories not entirely tied to geography.

“It’s not blame,” Reiter said, pulling his hand back from the engraving. “It’s myth.”

Lady Hagen rolled her eyes, blue mage marks glittering. “Well, I just got another letter from Stina’s cousin in Orin, and myth sheared off half a mountain, blocked the river, and flooded the village. There’s a good chance he wasn’t exaggerating this time since after the last council meeting the ambassador from Cafren asked me if I had any information on the stories she’d heard about earthquakes from her side of the border. The Pack Leader is thinking of sending someone north to see what’s going on.”

Reiter didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I can’t…”

“Yes, you can.” The baby kicked hard enough, it visibly adjusted the drape of her dress. It was a soft butter yellow, perfect for early fall. Her husband had died in the attack on the border, but the Aydori didn’t wear mourning. Reiter tugged at a black cuff. He did. “The garrison is nearly finished…” She raised a hand as he opened his mouth. “Fine. The part we need you for is nearly finished. We lost too many to send Pack or Mage-pack up into the mountains. You’re the obvious choice.”

“I’m expendable.”

“Yes.”

He’d helped free them, but he’d also been responsible for helping to capture them. And only four of the six had come home.

“You’re hiding here, Captain Reiter.” She didn’t sound unkind, but neither did she sound as though she’d allow him to stay in Aydori. To stay hiding in Aydori. “There’s only one way to find out if you have a place in her Pack.”

“And if I don’t know if I want a place?” There were songs about the Ghost Pack—in two languages—and rumors around Bercarit of a new opera.

“In the Pack or the myth?”

“Both. Either.”

Lady Hagen smiled. Reiter had been in Aydori long enough to recognize the difference between a smile and a show of teeth. This straddled the line. “There’s only one way to discover that as well.”

Snow had already fallen on the upper slopes of the mountain, but in Harar, the largest settlement in Orin, the reds and golds of fall still lingered. Dusty happily dove through drifts of fallen leaves, chasing a sparrow he had no hope of catching. Mirian was guessing about the reds and golds—her world remained grays and silver—but anyone with eyes could see Dusty’s mood. His tail and his ears were up and his tongue lolled from his half-open mouth and every now and then he barked as though he couldn’t help himself—in spite of lessons in the need for silence on the hunt from every single older member of the Pack.

The boy’s recovery had been remarkable. His fears were the fears of the Pack as a whole—none of them could face darkness—but his strengths were his own. The starved and wounded silent child Mirian had taken from the Imperial cell had become a curious, joyful, much loved heart of the Pack. He spent almost as much time in skin as he did in fur and in a few short months he’d become almost fluent in Ori. Not only had his nightmares stopped as long as he slept touching another of the Pack, but those touching him never woke screaming. Mirian had drawn up a complicated sleeping rotation that Tomas and Nine enforced. Fortunately, no one in the Pack had a problem with putting Dusty’s needs first.

Currently on guard, Bryan and Dillyn watched him from the porch. Dillyn had his head down on his front paws, but his eyes were open and all his attention was on the boy. Matt and Jace had gone hunting. They hadn’t gone far enough from the settlement to actually catch anything, which was why Mirian could sense matching pissy moods as they returned. They hadn’t yet determined how far apart she could be from her Pack and still maintain the connection—no one wanted to be the first to suddenly find themselves cut off from their Alpha. And, in fairness, she didn’t want to find herself cut off from them.

When the Pack Leader in Harar had curled his lip and informed her that kind of contact wasn’t normal for Alphas, only Tomas’ elbow had kept her from laughing. Laughter would be considered a challenge, and the last thing Mirian wanted was to end up responsible for the entire settlement. The Pack she had was responsibility enough.

She could hear Jared and Karl behind the house, arguing as they chopped wood. Seventeen and eighteen, they could manage skin as long as they had something that needed hands. Stephen would be watching them from the wellhead, the silvered stub of his tail tucked under his haunches. Stephen seldom wore skin. The emperor had taken something from his insides as well—his belly fur split by a diagonal silver streak—and he’d almost died before they’d reached a Healer-mage in the mountains. Nine had changed and carried him the last two days, snapping and snarling at anyone who tried to share the burden.

Tomas and Nine…

Mirian frowned. Nine felt angry. That wasn’t unusual. Unless he was with Dusty or her, anger was a constant with Nine. He’d refused to tell them his name…

“That man is dead. Nine will do.”

…and he fought at the slightest provocation. The settlement’s Alphas had learned to steer clear of him. No, Nine angry wasn’t unusual, but Tomas felt unsettled and that couldn’t be good.

Both Bryan and Dillyn rose to their feet as Mirian stepped off the porch. A gesture held them in place. The dead grass whispering under her boots, she crossed toward the path that led through the trees to the rest of the settlement. They’d been given land on the outskirts, half cleared, house half built and abandoned. Working together to make it habitable had smoothed out most of the Pack’s remaining twitches. Most. Not all.

She’d acquired a few twitches of her own.

“Just as you do not define the mage-craft, do not let it define you. If you fly everywhere, what use are your legs? You want to be the person you were as well as the person you are, walk. Sweat. Wait for strawberries to ripen the same as everyone else.” Hayla blinked eyes as much white from cataracts as from her scattering of mage marks and grinned toothlessly. “Don’t let young Master Hagen define your body, as enjoyable as that is. Define it yourself lest you lose it. You and the mage-craft are one, but you must be Alpha. Where are you taking those strawberries?”

“You said…”

“I said you should wait. I’m old and have a pitiful fraction of your power. Hand them over. Now, go pick up that mountain you dropped.”

Before Mirian reached the path, Nine trotted out into their clearing and crossed to where Dusty was stalking a beetle. Hackles up, he turned to face the trees, saying as clearly as if he’d spoken, that whoever was coming would only get near Dusty through him.

Tomas was in fur although the man with him wasn’t. He wore an Aydori greatcoat pulled tight under the straps of the pack rising behind his head.

“Captain Reiter.” Not a question. And Tomas felt unsettled, not surprised.

Nor did he look surprised after he changed and moved to stand by her side.

“Miss Maylin. Lord Hagen.” Reiter had gotten better at ignoring skin and looking Pack in the eye although a fresh scar on his jaw suggested it had taken him a while to learn. “The Pack Leader sent me to check on you.”

It was strange to see him in gray and white. The gold of his hair, the red of his whiskers, the blue of his eyes were gone. Mirian found herself missing color in a way she hadn’t for months. “To check on me?”

“On all of you.” Reiter looked calm as he swept his gaze over the visible members of the Pack. Nine stopped Dusty’s advance with a growl, then growled again in Reiter’s direction.

To Mirian’s surprise, the captain tipped his head to the side before saying, “Did you know they call you the Ghost Pack in the empire? You’ve become part of the stories people tell.”

“Really.” Tomas snorted. “What do they call you in the empire?”

“Traitor.”

Harsh but true.

“The Pack Leader,” Reiter began, but Mirian cut him off.

“Isn’t Alpha here. I am.” Mirian laid her words on the breeze. “She knows you’ve arrived, and that’s all she needs to know for now.” When Reiter drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, Mirian saw he breathed in through his nose, like Pack. “What do we call you?” she murmured.

“I guess that’s for you to say.”

“Do you have a first name, or is it captain?”

He stared at her for a long moment. “Sean.”

“Sean.” His eyes had been a pale enough blue that seen through mage-craft they were almost silver. “I guess if you want to know what we call you here…” She could feel his life at the edges of her senses. “…you’ll have to stay for a while until we figure it out.”