The novelty of riding a carriage through the Lombardi domain rapidly diminished in the first two or three days, as the experience of sitting in a carriage, unable to leave, rendered it much the same as riding through the Printemps domain.

  Our journey was to take two weeks, and would follow the Aurum river for much of it before diverging south slightly to cut a straighter path to Doromare, where the road would meet with the river again shortly before it met the sea.

  And, once again, Father had forbidden Erika or I to take any rest outside the carriage. Every night, we would stop at one of the many small towns that had formed to take advantage of travelers on the main road from Guldenfel to Doromare, but only the coachman would take any rest there. The guards would remain outside our carriage, protecting it from any harm and ensuring that we did not stray far from it.

  Erika had mentioned that better treatment was likely ahead of us, but by the fourth night I was starting to wonder if that really would be the case. I felt dirty, and incensed at the idea of being caged in such a tight area. We slept a lot, for there was nothing to read and nothing to see out the window but the river to one side and gently sloping plains to the other.

  It was on this fourth night that Erika finally fell into a deep sleep before I did, and I chanced to venture out of the carriage to see Tor and the other guards around their campfire.

  "'Oy there, m'lady! Yer jes' in time to 'ear Sybil tell us about 'er luck at tha' last town."

  "What luck, Tor? That man turned out to be a complete disappointment."

  "Oh? But ye looked so 'appy when ye wandered off with 'im!"

  Sybil muttered something quiet to Tor as I sat down, and he guffawed heartily. Looking around, I did not see the other two guards anywhere.

  "Ah, they're taking first sleep, m'lady. They'll be takin' over the watch when it's our turn."

  Sybil's mouth curled on one side in a look of disapproval. In the light of the campfire, she looked quite imposing. Her brown hair was tightly braided into rows on her scalp, ending in a tight bun, and her dark brown eyes reflected the fire in a way that felt like it was captured within them.

  "They're a bunch of layabouts is what they are. We should have split our shifts, Tor. I don't trust them. Not them, and not that coachman. It's odd how much money he has to spend every night."

  "They seem pretty standard to me, Sybil. Ye can' expect everyone to live up to the Nightingale standard."

  As their conversation continued on without me Sybil shared a few choice words with Tor that I found quite intriguing, but I allowed my gaze to wander about the area and soak in the small amount of freedom I had stolen for myself.

  Tor had recently shaved his head, and it shone with the light of the fire. It looked good on him, although the polished look required me to suppress a laugh. His eyes were clear and blue, and I liked the way he looked at Sybil and me. He saw us as ourselves, and he made me feel safe.

  Sybil's musculature was clearly defined, the dark shadows cast by the fire making her look statuesque. It was a different sort of look to Tor's more bulky build, although the two of them were both quite tall. She seemed to take her job very seriously, and she had no shortage of criticisms for her sleeping coworkers due to their lack of respect or professionalism.

  Tor and Sybil were both armed with two blades each. One was a full-length sword, intended for use with one or both hands, and these they kept to the side of them in their sheaths, leaning up against the log we were using as a seat. The second blade they each kept was about half the length, still strapped to their sides, and bore matching crests on their pommels that I couldn't quite make out in the dark.

  Sybil's eyes snapped onto me as she noticed my eyes on her weapon, and her hand reflexively placed her palm onto the pommel of her short sword to keep it in place. "Be careful, my lady. Your eyes seem rather greedy and a gal might get the wrong idea."

  I was taken quite aback by this, but Tor's laugh diffused the situation and turned fear into embarrassment. "Sybil, go easy on the lass. She don' mean nothing by it."

  He reached to his side and unclasped his own blade from the sheathe, drawing it slowly and turning it around to show it to me in both hands.

  "Sybil and I trained under the same master in the Nightingales. I tol' you a bit abou' them before, but they take in orphans an' strangers alike. Your backgroun' don' mean a thing if yer willin' to put blade to flesh for coin."

  The blade looked exceptionally well cared for, but other than its shorter length and the design on the pommel it was unremarkable. The crest, which I now saw clearly in the light of the fire, was a bird holding a ribbon in its beak, but the words on the ribbon were small marks and indistinct.

  "In love, loss. In life, death," Sybil said quietly, her eyes watching me trace the ribbon on the seal. "Our master's personal motto."

  "Well, if ye 'ang around Guldenfel long enough, ye might meet our master for yerself. She's quite expensive, more than most are willin' to pay, so she spends most 'er time training the new birds at our guild 'all."

  "That, and drinking her sorrows away at some bar or another. Why, just the other day, she..."

  Sybil and Tor continued to share gossip among themselves, and my eyes began to droop after only a few more minutes. Tor's laugh came often, occasionally accompanied by Sybil's own, more muted chuckles, and I slowly felt myself slide into sleep under their care.

  ---

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  Blood. Blood everywhere. All around me.

  Erika and Char were dead on the ground next to me, bleeding from wounds drawn on them by vines and thorns.

  My body was also covered in vines, but instead of binding me, they were coming from me. Leaking out of my wounds where blood should be.

  Sybil and Tor were there, too, the vines stretching out wrap around their necks as they choked for breath. From there they spread further, to Jerem and Gertrude, even the Belles and Beatrice.

  Everyone around me was caught in my wake, and the face of my Father loomed over all of us.

  The ground began to rumble, and I fell as it gave way. But the vines caught me, looping tight around my neck as they snapped taut.

  ---

  I was startled awake by an abrupt sensation of falling, and a sharp pain pulsing through my side. A hand was gripping my head tightly, and I realized that I was being tackled to the ground.

  "Shh. Keep yer 'ead down m'lady. It'll be over quick."

  There was shouting, and the screeching keen of steel against steel, and I struggled to try and get a grip of what was happening, but Tor's hands clenched tighter around me to hold me still, and his body was pressed down on mine to cover it with his.

  I heard laughing, from some voices I didn't know. "Well well, the housemaid knows how to fight, does she? But you're outnumbered, mutt. Just hand over the girl and we'll be on our way."

  A second voice chimed in, "''sides, girlie. You know we won't hurt her none. She'll be worth more intact."

  I heard Sybil grunt, and a whooshing noise, and then the voice that was just speaking was silenced with a gurgling cry. The shouting around us rose to a roar, and I heard heavy boots approach.

  "Where the fuck are Rupert and Paul..." I heard Tor mutter to himself, and his arms reached down to pick me up. He had seen a small opening, and he was now shoving himself off the ground to carry me to the carriage.

  In the light of the fire, I saw four men stepping over the body of a fifth as they approached Sybil in an uncoordinated mass. The man on the ground's face had a dagger sticking out of it, and the sight made me nearly want to vomit.

  Sybil's sword was too far away to reach for at the moment, but she was holding her short sword in one hand and reaching for a buckler strapped behind her waist with the other.

  "Tor, wait, you have to help Sybil," I cried as I struggled against him, but he did not relent. "You come first, m'lady."

  The sounds of a swordfight began, but I couldn't see clearly what was happening past Tor's shoulders anymore. He threw me into the carriage with a hard toss, and shut the door behind, turning to draw his own short sword with his back to the window, and I now saw that Sybil was retreating backward towards him while trying to deflect the lunges and thrusts from the four men.

  Dizzily, I recognized this as Lombardi style fencing. In the stress of the moment, my mind starting spitting out a flurry of memorized facts about the thin blades favored by the Lombardi family and their branch houses, the subsequent child arts born from this style, and the various methods by which the other two ducal families had refined their own art to combat it.

  Sybil was catching the thrusts with her buckler to deflect them off to the side, but unable to follow up because whenever she made to step forward to thrust with her own blade she was warded off by another one of the four men.

  As Tor joined her, he started circling off to the side of their formation to try to flank them and break their advantage, but there were just too many of them, and despite their lack of coordination it seemed hopeless.

  Tor and Sybil would die in just a few short moments if nobody did anything. But the other two guards weren't here. They had clearly abandoned their watch, confirming Sybil's suspicions.

  Somebody had to do something.

  Nobody was doing anything.

  A thrust caught Sybil's right shoulder and her arm flagged. She was reduced to sweeping the blades aside as she and Tor retreated closer and closer to the carriage, until finally her grip on her sword loosened and it fell to the ground.

  I took a deep intake of breath, and the panic settling in caused me to lose focus on my control. I felt my lungs fill with air... and my body refining magic from it.

  Sybil getting hurt meant that she would bleed, and die.

  But me getting hurt? That meant nothing. I would recover in mere hours at most.

  I kicked the door open, screaming in panic as I dove towards the melee in nothing but my nightgown.

  Tor and Sybil both shouted at me, but they kept their focus and angled to protect me rather than turn to look at me.

  The men laughed at my stupidity. Nobody realized that I was going for Sybil's sword until it was already in hand.

  I picked it up and swung it as hard as I could at the rightmost man, catching him by surprise and eliciting a scream from him as the blade sliced through the flesh of his left arm. Tor took the opportunity to cut off his hand with a deft cut while the other three turned to face me as well.

  I stepped forward, pivoting my weight on my feet as if this were a waltz to keep my balance.

  A sword stabbed directly through me. I grabbed onto the basketed crossguard with my hand and kept moving, wildly swinging Sybil's blade upward to catch the second man on the chin, sliding through the front of his neck. Something hot and wet rained down from above me, and I allowed myself to forget for the moment what it was.

  A second sword stabbed me through my chest, catching me through one of my lungs. I gasped and choked as magic began to fill the air all around me in a haze.

  Sybil shoved the edge of her buckler through the third man's nose. The pain and blood was starting to get so bad that I couldn't see clearly anymore. Whatever Tor did was a blur, but the last man let out a quiet gasp as he fell down dead.

  Sybil and Tor were shouting at me. I heard Erika screaming from the carriage, but I could no longer make out what any of them were saying. Unable to keep my balance anymore, I simply fell over onto my side, breathing deeply as I tried to pull out one of the thin blades stuck in me.

  Sybil was shouting again, stopping my hand from doing so as she put pressure on my wounds. "She doesn't understand. I need this out."

  Erika tackled Sybil to the side with the whole of her body weight so that she could rip the sword out of my lung. Immediately, I felt a burning sensation as the holes sealed themselves. I gasped and choked blood out through my mouth, the agony becoming too much to bear. A roaring noise in my ears crowded out all other sounds, and the edges of my vision began to darken.

  But as I lay there, staring up at the stars, I couldn't help but feel that they were beautiful, shining brighter and brighter as I felt myself fading away.

  However, the stars soon became too blurry to see, and the only thing I could make out was the shape of Erika bending over me, and as the world slipped into nothingness the last thing I felt was something cool and wet falling onto my face from hers.

  "Ah, I've made you cry again."