“-and next time you should take me with you,” Rianne continued, without any noticeable pause while Liv got her daughter settled onto the cushion in between her and Keri. “Because you know I don’t get mana sickness and I want to see the birds and the crabs. Do all the crabs move sideways and clack their claws?” She held her little hands up to either side of her head, making makeshift claws with her fingers touched to her thumb, and opened and closed them a few times. “We could have crab soup.”

  “We didn’t go there to play,” Liv pointed out. “We went there so the students could practice fighting, Rianne. And you’re too young to fight yet.” She leaned over her daughter’s head to give Keri a quick kiss. “Welcome home, love. How bad was it?”

  “The fighting wasn’t so bad,” Keri said. “Though your old friend Tej Mishra is looking a bit long in the tooth. He wasn’t fit enough to ride a warhorse; they had him hoisted up on a litter while he relayed commands. Anyway, his ksatriya were able to drive Noghis off all on their own. I didn’t need to do much of anything but keep an eye on things.”

  “It is their kingdom,” Liv reminded him. “We just sent you and our soldiers along to help, not to take the lead. What were they doing up there in the mountains, anyway? We hardly ever find Ractia’s people still doing - anything, really. Usually they’ve abandoned a rift by the time we get there, and looted everything they want.”

  “Sapphires,” Rei said, holding a rock up in his hand. He waited just a moment, then tossed it across the room to Liv.

  Rather than try to catch it with her hands, Liv scooped the hunk of stone out of the air with a mental flex of Aluth. She had never been permitted to play ball with other Whitehill children when she was a girl, for fear she’d break a bone in the often rough games, and she didn’t trust herself not to drop the thing on her daughter's head. A swirl of sparkling blue and gold mana deposited the sapphire into her left hand, where Rianne leaned over to peer at it.

  “Doesn’t look like a sapphire,” the little girl complained. “Gems are supposed to be sparkly and pretty and colored. That’s just a dirty rock with a bit of blue in it.”

  “It’s just been pulled out of the ground,” Keri explained. “It has to be cut and polished, yet. Mishra wanted your mother to have a look at it, and see if there’s anything special about it.”

  “I’m not even certain where to start,” Liv admitted, though that wasn’t entirely true. She let Aluth remain awake at the back of her mind, and used the word of power to feel for any sort of enchantment or magic laid on or inside of the stone. She would have been surprised to find anything: the sapphire was clearly unworked, so Liv didn’t see how anyone could possibly have etched any kind of sigils into it. There was, however, one oddity.

  “Were these things mined from a rift?” she asked Keri.

  “No.” He shook his head. “If they had been, I would have brought all of our troops back immediately, but they’re going to have to march out with General Mishra’s men.”

  “That is odd, then,” Liv said, turning the rock over in her hand while her daughter rubbed at it with the hem of her dress. Rianne had apparently decided that if she polished it a bit, it might turn into the kind of glittering jewel she’d been picturing. “I would have guessed this came from a shoal. It’s been soaking in ambient mana for years, at least. It would make a much better base for an enchantment than a normal sapphire.”

  Keri frowned. “Perhaps we should have waited for Wren,” he muttered. “I’m sure she could have gotten a better look at what they were actually doing before Noghis began tearing everything down.”

  “How were they moving the stones out?” Rei asked.

  Liv did her best not to smile. Keri’s son had been putting himself forward more and more in conversations such as this, asking questions and giving his own ideas. He clearly wanted to help, to be involved in what his father was doing, and while he was still a bit young to understand everything, she sympathized. After all, she’d been even smaller when she fought off the stone-bats that came for Julianne.

  “That, I did see,” Keri explained. “As soon as I was close enough, I cast Revelation -”

  “I can’t wait to learn that spell,” Rei muttered.

  “- and saw them using blood portals to move out loads of stone,” Keri continued, after a brief pause for the interruption.

  Ghveris gave a huff of steam and a grinding sound that usually indicated frustration. “An unacceptable strategic and tactical disadvantage,” the war machine complained. “That ritual lets them move independent of the waystone network.”

  His reaction didn’t surprise Liv at all - particularly since he and Wren, along with a group of Lucanian lords and knights, had been the first to see such a portal in action. Since that first incident in the basement of the Drovers Guild hall in Freeport, they’d found traces of ritual circles laid out in blood on half a dozen occasions, and Wren’s scouts had even seen it in use twice. A flat circle of fresh blood, rimmed by glowing sigils, and functioning precisely like a waystone when activated, right down to the column of light that reached up into the sky and swept away whoever was standing on - or in this case, ankle deep in - the blood portal.

  “Not so much independent,” Liv pointed out, “as it lets them set a temporary stone up wherever they want. Though it does seem to take a prohibitive number of sacrifices to make one work.” As best Liv and Sidonie could tell, the spell was a combination of at least Ract and Aluth, and they suspected that it might function on similar principles to a tether, but they’d never had a chance to examine an active blood portal in any kind of depth.

  “Regardless,” she said, “I’m going to bring this down to Professor Norris tomorrow and see what he has to say about it.”

  “Can I come?” Rianne said. The little girl rearranged herself so that she could gaze up at Liv and blink her eyes slowly and deliberately - a technique which caused Liv no end of trouble when it came to the palace staff.

  “You have lessons,” Liv declared, for her own part utterly immune. Well, mostly. “And your grandfather and great-grandmother will be here tomorrow for the council. They’re going to want to see you.”

  Rianne squealed at that, leapt off the cushioned bench, and began running about the room in circles.

  “That was your own mistake,” Keri pointed out. “Trinity only knows how we’ll get her to sleep after that.”

  Rei watched his sister’s cackling sprint with a sort of bemused superiority. “Was I ever like that?”

  Both Liv and Keri couldn’t help but burst out laughing, and even Ghveris joined in.

  ?

  ‘How,’ it turned out, involved not only three stories, but also a soft ray of sunlight filtered through a conjured crystal of ice, which Liv rotated in the air just above Rianne’s bed so that it scattered soft blue, green and purple lights across the ceiling. The combination of she and Keri’s magic was a much lower powered version of some experiments they’d done years before, inspired by some of the crystal-encrusted bears that prowled around the Tomb of Celris.

  By the time Liv and Keri had gone to their own bed, waving off her ladies-in-waiting, she’d been almost too tired to do anything but snuggle into her husband’s arms. Almost.

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  In the morning, Liv rose first, pulled a shift on, and grabbed both her stormwand and the sapphire off the end table next to her side of the bed. She leaned over the tangle of sheets and pillows to give Keri a soft kiss on the forehead, and then walked into her dressing room, closing the door to the bed-chamber behind her so that he could sleep.

  There, Miina, Venla and Lenota had already laid out several choices of clothing for the day, along with a few different pairs of shoes. To Liv’s great regret, her enchanted boots from Lendh ka Dakruim were getting a bit worn after so many years, and she no longer wore them every day. She’d had a good cobbler put new soles on the bottoms three times over the years, and she’d even considered ordering a few more pairs from the east, but somehow felt that it wouldn’t be quite the same.

  “Good to have him home?” Miina teased, waggling her eyebrows in a way that left no doubt in Liv’s mind the question was meant to be sexual in nature.

  “Yes, it is,” Liv said, batting her cousin’s shoulder gently with her hand. “Something you’d know if you ever settled down with just one person.”

  Miina shrugged. “Things don’t usually work out that way for me.”

  “There was a time I thought they might, with Blaise Crosbie,” Liv pointed out.

  “Yes, well, now he’s old, fat, and married,” Miina groused.

  “He isn’t even fourty,” Liv protested. “That isn’t old for a human.”

  “It’s old enough,” Lenota Grenfell said. “I mean, it’s one thing if you get there together, I suppose.”

  “Enough!” Miina declared. “Into the bath with you, Liv.”

  It had taken a good bit of doing for the stonemasons of House Isakki to find a way to tap into the subterranean river that ran through the roots of Bald Peak, before it joined with the Aspen. In the end, they’d had to work together with the Most Worshipful Society of Pipes and Waters, with the Eld opening a passage through the stone up to the summit, and the guildsmen laying hundreds of yards of enchanted clay pipes. Every length was worked with enchantments which used Ved - licensed from the Banks family - to pull water up through the mountain to a central cistern. From there, half a dozen primary lines ran out through the palace, branching like the capillaries of the human body to provide water to every room that needed it.

  Only at the very end of each pipe, where the water erupted forth into a sink, garderobe, or bath, were the V?r-based inscriptions set, heating the water to the desired temperature just as it came out. And while the palace did indeed possess a larger facility for group bathing, modelled after the Summersets natural hot springs in Whitehill, Liv also had a private bath for her own mornings and evenings. It was one of the few places she could retreat to with some assurance that no pressing business from a foreign ambassador, angry guild representative, or panicked student would reach her.

  She let herself soak, submerged to the chin, long enough for her ladies to wash her hair, comb it out again, and then put it up for the day. After that, however, Liv knew there was simply too much that needed to be done to linger. A light meal had been set out in her dressing room, and she alternated between slices of fresh apples, grown in the orchards on the south slope of Bald Peak so that they were bursting with mana, and fresh, hot bread slathered with honey-butter. There was tea, as well, and juicy sausages practically bursting from their casings, and it was a good thing that someone had thought ahead enough to send a hand-towel, or Liv’s greasy fingers would have ruined her dress for the day before she even got out of the room.

  As the eighth bell struck, Thora arrived, holding Liv’s schedule for the day.

  “I need a full bell to go down and speak with Professor Norris,” Liv said, before her steward could even open her mouth.

  “You are fully booked, after taking the entire day yesterday to go gallivanting with your students,” Thora remarked. Had she begun plucking her eyebrows in a sharper, more angular shape, Liv wondered?

  “I hardly took the entire day,” Liv protested. “I had a meeting with the Banking Guild in the morning, didn’t I?”

  “You and Edwin Teller conspiring about how to undercut Sherard trading routes through the eastern passes hardly counts as official business,” Thora declared. “The two of you were cackling together the entire time. No, you have actual work to be done today, preferably before your father arrives at the second bell of the afternoon - because I know any meetings I schedule for after that might as well not exist.”

  Liv sighed. “Alright. What’s on your list that we can get rid of?”

  “Nothing,” Thora insisted. “You have a meeting with the assembly of mayors over luncheon. You’re hosting them in the private dining room at Queen’s Court -”

  “Can’t really put them off, I suppose,” Liv admitted. “And it’s likely to run hours. Before that?”

  “Tea with Eluard Fox, from the Merchants Guild,” Thora said. “And before that, there’s a carriage waiting in the lower yard right now to take you to the Temple. They want to show you the finished Sharma Garden to get your approval before the dedication ceremony.”

  “We can reschedule with Fox,” Liv decided. “Invite him up to dinner, and I’ll find a chance to speak with him while my father’s occupied with Rianne. He won’t mind.”

  “Actually, this time, he does,” Thora declared. “He was quite specific that he needed to speak to you as soon as possible. He was already in quite a huff when he found me yesterday, and I think if you’d been anywhere in the city, rather than flying around the fens, he would have stomped right out to find you.”

  Liv sighed. “Alright. Send my regrets to the temple. No, don’t send my regrets - send my husband.”

  Thora blinked. “Is he awake? He just got in last evening. I’d assumed we’d be giving him the morning off.”

  “Send our daughter in to get him up,” Liv declared, with a grin. “That’ll have him awake in no time. He can look over the garden and tell me about it later today. Now, I need to go find Professor Norris before anyone else finds something I need to do.” She snatched up the sapphire, and made her escape.

  ?

  Stepping into the enchanting workshops at the Bald Peak College was, for Liv, like taking a step back in time. The hum of voices, clang of tools, and general cacophony was precisely the same as she remembered it from her first Enchanting class at Coral Bay. She suspected that was just how such workshops were: but it didn’t hurt when the same man who’d taught her then now served as master here.

  She found Professor Norris in the chemist's laboratories, where he had multiple glass vials full of whale oil. When Liv checked the label on the barrel, which was now only half full and set to one side of the room, she found that it had been shipped from Cold Harbor. She wondered whether her husband had anything to do with arranging that.

  “ - take this down carefully, now,” Norris insisted, though he didn’t spare an actual glance for the journeyman who’d been tasked with keeping his notes. She was an ink-smudged, cute little thing, Liv decided, and probably from Al’Fenthia. The slightly elongated tips of the ears were the same shape Liv saw in her mirror every morning.

  “Mana saturation clearly increases both the intensity and duration of the lamp oil when burned,” Norris continued. He hadn’t reacted to Liv’s entrance, but she didn’t mind: that was just how he was. The man was single minded, utterly focused on whatever he was pursuing at the moment to the exclusion of all else. Though his face had grown more gaunt, and his skin papery-thin with age, that hadn’t changed. “Now, it will require extensive experimentation and precise measurement to calculate the precise effect based on the rate of saturation. We’ll begin with trials that -”

  “Before you get too deep into this,” Liv broke in, “I have something I’d like you to look at that I think you may find interesting.”

  The journeyman gasped, spun around, and ducked into a curtsy. “Archmagus - I mean, Your Majesty.”

  Norris, on the other hand, simply, turned and glared at her. “More important than examining a sample of Behemoth Whale oil that I had to wait nearly a year for?”

  Liv grinned, but before she answered, she decided to have mercy on the poor girl who was trembling in panic. “Journeyman, I’m going to steal a moment of Professor Norris’s time, but I’m going to give him back to you in a bit, and he may need you. Would you mind getting a pot of his favorite tea? He might have a dry throat by the time we’re done talking.”

  “Of course, Archmagus!” The girl scurried out the door, and once it had closed behind her, Liv lifted her hand out, extending it so that Norris could see what she held.

  The professor adjusted his spectacles on his nose, and leaned forward. “This is -”

  “A sapphire recovered from Ractia’s mining operation in the northern mountains of Lendh ka Dakruim,” Liv said. “According to Keri, they’ve been discarding or selling everything else, but keeping the sapphires. And this was not taken from the shoals of a rift, but it’s saturated with mana. I need to know how, and what this could possibly be used for.”

  Norris reached out and took the sapphire, holding it up between his face and the light. “You always do bring me the most interesting things,” he grumbled. “Have since the very first day you turned up at coral bay with a giant casque.”

  Liv smiled fondly. “That’s why you came north, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Norris agreed. “Alright.” He looked over the whale-oil, and sighed. “I’ll have my students seal the barrel up, and I’ll see what I can do with this.”

  “Thank you,” Liv said. “Enjoy your tea.” She patted the old man on his shoulder, then turned to duck out of the chemist's laboratory. Liv even managed to avoid getting caught up with any of the other projects scattered about the workshops on her way out, but she ran out of luck when she stepped into the bright light and building heat of the morning, because someone was waiting for her.

  “Can I have a moment, Aunt Liv?” Henriette Summerset asked.

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  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. Queen of the Alliance and Lady of Winter. Can you imagine what her insurance rates would be like on injured students? [38 Rings of Mana, not counting mana stored in items.]

  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. Grumpy until Wren gets back. [Mana Battery: 10 Rings]

  Henriette Summerset aka Ettie- Daughter of Matthew and Triss, niece of Liv and Keri, cousin of Rei and Princess Rianne. Heir to the Duchy of Whitehill. Apprentice of the Mages Guild. Ambush! [12 Rings of Mana]

  Inkeris "Keri" ka Ilmari k?n B?lris - Originally of the Unconquered House of B?lris, now Prince Consort of the Alliance. Husband of Liv, father to Rei and the princess. Immediately sent off to do royal family stuff upon arriving home. [22 Rings of Mana.]

  Lenota Grenfell - Daughter of the late Isaac Grenfell, sister of the current Baron, and Lady in Waiting. Considers 40 old. ::Weeps in Author:: [12 Rings of Mana]

  Miina t?r Eilis, of House D?ivi - Daughter of Eilis, niece of Eila, cousin of Liv, Lady in Waiting. Also, still single. [23 Rings of Mana]

  Norris - Master Mage, Professor of Enchanting at Bald Peak. Has become Liv's personal mad-scientist, with an unlimited budget. [17 Rings of Mana]

  Rei ka Inkeris k?n B?lris - Son of Keri and Rika. Longing for an archmage spell. Still a long way off. [14 Rings of Mana]

  Rianne t?r Inkeris, Princess of the Alliance - Daughter of Liv and Keri. Primary offensive weapon: looking cute. [11 Rings of Mana]

  Thora - Former lady's Maid to Liv, now Steward of Bald Peak. The kingdom would literally fall apart without her.