Everything was too loud. Not that there were a lot of sounds, but she could hear heavy wagons moving nearby as if they were rolling over her head, and poor Honor had no way to make them stop. Very softly, she whispered, "What was in that dri—?"

  "Drink?" Fife asked, her voice a low rumble in the small bedroom. "When you started, ale and some kind of distilled stuff. Then you and Breath of Spring started drinking something she said came from a cherry tree, but smelled too dangerous for a fire dragon to be around."

  Jerking her head up, but unable to rise further due to something heavy on her, Honor looked around the darkened room but couldn't see where Fife was. Then the mental pain of moving her head too fast struck, and she let out a soft whine.

  "No one knew what to do with you, so I carried you up here and figured I'd make sure nothing untoward happened to the King's cousin while she's temporarily unable to run the country due to an impressive intake of alcohol. Your bodyguard is out in the main room, sleeping. I assured him I wouldn't leave you unguarded." Lifting a lantern off the wall, Fife tilted the glass up and blew on the wick inside. There was just enough flame to make the oil-soaked cloth start to burn before she turned the lamp down and set it back in its spot.

  Bright enough to see now, Honor realized why she hadn't been able to get up. There was a wyvern lying on each side of her, each with wings stretched over her body. The situation reminded her of times when she was younger, when she'd slipped from her bedroom to sleep in the stable with her father's hunting dogs. They had kept her safe, too, but like the wyverns, she hadn't been able to get out from under them before her father had found her.

  "Are they going to do this every day?" Honor asked.

  "Probably. They took a shine to you. Mixie scared them recently, and they've been looking for a way to get out because she kept trying to paint fire patterns on their scales with glitter. You wanted wyverns, you got wyverns. Oh, that reminds me. Trav? She's awake and sober now."

  "Oh! Sorry, Honor, I didn't want to disturb your beauty sleep."

  Travis' voice was, somehow, worse than any other sound. It reverberated inside Honor's head and she reached down to grab a wyvern wing and hide further under it. Instead, the wyvern it belonged to woke up and turned, licking her face. "Ack! Help!"

  "I lost a hand once getting between a wyvern and what it wanted," Fife said. "Trav, she's hungover. Give her the Priest class so she can heal it away."

  That got Honor's attention. "I can heal this?"

  "Yeah. Cast Focused Heal on yourself. You have that now," Travis said, after he paid the thousand gold for it.

  "How? What's casting? Do I just say Focused Heal and—?" Power, raw power, flowed through Honor and circled around to affect her directly. It cleared her head, stopped her stomach from feeling upset, and made it easier to think. "Wow. Okay, you two get off and let's go terrorize some nobles."

  Bookkeeper jerked as if stung by a god of bees. She was used to having her own magic called on—that was something dungeon creatures casting divine spells did all the time—but this was a human!

  She had been in the process of adjusting the new Awakened Verdant class of dungeons, again, when Travis had made a human who didn't directly worship another god into a Priest.

  Putting aside her work to constrain the frankly amazing growth potential of the one example of an Awakened Verdant dungeon, which while it had led to a massive influx of worship, had also strained her ability to warp space, she looked a little closer at what Travis had done now.

  When the woman he'd made into a Priest cast a spell, it had been akin to a follower of Bookkeeper's calling on her power to cast it.

  The weirdest part was that the person had felt the connection, too, if only briefly. Bookkeeper lent her power to her dungeons all the time, but this was new and unique! Pausing her latest work on Awakened Verdant dungeons, Bookkeeper had the inspiration to write a new model: Dungeon Allies.

  Clothed in more than her underthings, Honor stepped out of the bedroom and into a hallway that led to a communal room. There, her bodyguard looked awake and ready for action. She opened her mouth to tell him to escort her back to the keep when a surprising warmth poured through her.

  The feeling reminded her of the power she'd used to heal her hangover and, somehow, old books. It almost felt more cozy than her memory of snuggling under her father's hunting dogs had been. "I'm ready to head back."

  "Your Ladyship, allow me to escort you." The king's guardsman was glad for the noise Fife had made in waking Honor. It had given him a chance to clear the cobwebs from his head and make himself presentable.

  "Uh, Honor, there was something else I wanted you to have." Travis was relieved to see she didn't wince from his voice this time. He didn't restrict it to Honor, either, giving Fife and the bodyguard the chance to hear it. "Fife, can you show her to the gunsmith?"

  "Ohhh," Fife said. "You've got Tinpot to make her something special?"

  "It's her fighting style, Fife. I couldn't let her go without giving her gifts." Travis didn't exactly know what Tinpot had done, but when he'd asked for a gun to be made for a rifleman, Tinpot had gotten very excited.

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  Fife's presence suppressed the outgoing nature of the two wyverns a little, and the pair followed along as she led the way to the gunsmith. "Here we are. You in there, Tinpot?"

  "Do I ever leave?" Tinpot called back. When he saw Honor, he dipped his head. "Trav asked me to make something special for you, ma'am, and I think I'll have something you might like." Lifting a rifle from his workbench, Tinpot first swung the cylinder out and showed that it had no cartridges in it, then passed it to Honor. "Six-shot rifle. All you have to do is load it, pull the hammer back, and fire. The barrel is thin-machined adamantine, receiver and stock are mithril machined out in places, and a leather heel."

  Staring at what seemed like a masterpiece. Honor could scarcely believe what she was holding. "How is adamantine this light?" She raised the weapon to her shoulder and, in her estimation, it was lighter than a steel rifle of the same size.

  "Look down the barrel. It's an interference fit of an adamantine inner sleeve and reinforcing from mithril. If you'd like to fire it, this box here is the ammo, and through the side door there is a range. Only use the gold ones for practice shooting." Watching the reverence and experience Honor showed with the firearm, Tinpot couldn't keep a big smile from his face.

  Having seen her cousin's revolvers, Honor was familiar with the mechanism, though she hadn't seen any rifles with it. She ejected the cylinder, put a cartridge into it, and stepped into the range. There was dim lighting in here, but enough for her to see the end of the tunnel. Sliding the cylinder home, she cocked the rifle as she lifted it to her shoulder, lined up the sights on a small burn mark, and fired.

  The gun hadn't kicked nearly as much as she expected it to. When she lowered the barrel and looked to the end of the tunnel, she could see a fresh piece of stone chipped from the middle of the burn mark and it had a smear of gold on it.

  Honor stepped back into the gunsmith proper and looked over the gun some more. "So it's lighter than a steel rifle, more accurate than one, doesn't need to be muzzle-loaded, and I can shoot six times as fast as I breathe?"

  "That sums it up," Tinpot said, taking the rifle from her and removing the spent steel cartridge case and adding it to a bag of them he kept. "I've standardized the cartridge size, and we can now make a lot of them easily. If you collect the empty ones, it works out a bit cheaper." He carefully set the rifle into a wooden case with its cleaning equipment and two boxes of ammunition.

  Honor was about to thank Tinpot and Travis profusely when Tinpot set a smaller case on top of the first. "What—?"

  "We can't have you leaving here with that antique on your hip. Two revolvers." Tinpot slid a little case of shells over that had the top painted red. "And these are explosive bullets. Don't use these unless you want something or someone very dead."

  Having received a run-down of events that led to his own inheritance of the throne from her cousin, Honor knew the effectiveness of those bullets. "If it comes down to me shooting, I will want everything near me dead anyway."

  As Travis watched Honor leaving his entrance in Home, he felt again something he had learned to dislike. He was getting experience without an obvious source. The trickle turned into a veritable flood as his numbers ticked up in little bursts.

  "Mortar shells."

  "What's up, Travis?"

  Travis' thought had, due to a deep-seated need to talk to someone, reached out to Brayden. "Sorry, I didn't mean to bother you," he said, realizing Brayden was in Brogdar's temple.

  "You're never bothering me." Sheathing his mace, Brayden bowed in the direction of the altar to show his respect to his god, then found a seat. "What about the mortar shells? I thought they had solved a problem?"

  "I'm getting XP from them. I can watch it come in and…" Travis sighed. He wanted to shut up and not talk about it, but he knew that wouldn't help in the slightest. "Some of it is coming from people. Not all of it, I know, because attacking a city at all gave me XP early on, and a quest, but we made so many of those shells."

  "Some are, undoubtedly, killing people. It is a siege, Travis. What you did here in Northridge was unprecedented. Only the King could afford to protect entire armies with talismans, but not even he would afford the entire population of a city perpetual protection. Even then, siege weapons such as those mortars, cannons, and others will often destroy talismans." It was the bare truth, but Brayden knew Travis well enough that he would have figured this out for himself. Lying about it would be obvious and useless. "Stewart is no butcher, though. He won't aim his weapons at the housing of West Reaches and level the city. No. He'll target walls. Soldiers will die, on both sides, but he won't needlessly kill those who never wished to fight."

  Travis took that in. For all he'd know, there were wars in the world before he came to this one; he'd never been part of them. This was the second time he'd been part of such a battle, and he felt keenly that this time the people impacted by his efforts wouldn't just be soldiers. "I hate it."

  Brayden kept his voice even. "What do you hate?"

  "Wars. Fighting. People dying for bad reasons." From one of several lizards in the room, Travis could see Brayden smile. "Look, I know that's a good thing. Dungeons here—active dungeons like that goblin one and those around Home and Polfay—find killing as the easiest path to growth. I was so relieved when the gnolls didn't immediately attack."

  "Because it would be up to you to organize people to kill them." So much Brayden had to say so that Travis could hear it out loud. He waited a moment before continuing. "How long before our next test here?"

  "Hilda said the thaw. As soon as the pass is clear, they'll come. We have some five months to finish the walls around Northridge. Tannyr knows, as does the council. I'm also pushing for Far Reach to start building the railway. It would be nice to have that established so they can gain the benefits of being close to Home." Travis had, he knew too well, a lot of projects ongoing. Distracting himself from the war was hard, though, when his experience numbers kept ticking up. "I'm getting sidetracked."

  "But you can't ignore it, can you? The counters?"

  "No. That's the worst of it."

  Brayden thought for a moment and then considered an idea. "Why don't you let Fife lead another dungeon fight? Ask if Home or Polfay has a dungeon they can delve. That would make it harder to focus on the incoming XP as being from the war, right?"

  "Huh. That might help. Thank you, Brayden."

  "Any time you need to talk, Travis, I am always here to listen." Brayden waited for a moment to see if his friend would reply, but when no more words came, he stood and prepared to return to his prayer. He'd need a lot more praying if Fife was going to drag him into another dungeon.

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