Dain wrapped both hands around the lady’s ankles, and his heels dug into the ground the way Hugo showed him when a plank fought him.

  ‘Lean back. Use your weight. Don’t argue with the wood. Just move it.’

  The pointy-eared lady groaned as he dragged her through the forest. “I said get me on my feet, not haul me like a sack of mushrooms.”

  He didn’t bother responding. If he treated her like lumber to be dragged around, he could pretend she wasn’t a bleeding, fallen star with a staff that could probably crush him in a single heartbeat.

  The forest at night was all wet bark and the noise the rain made when it wanted to be a thousand tiny hammers. But somewhere through the trees, he thought he heard a howl, and his throat tried to jump out of his neck. Magic beasts prowled out here. Hugo always told him that if he heard one, he had to climb or he wouldn’t get to hear again.

  Another groan from the lady. “Left,” she croaked. “There.”

  He followed her shaking finger and saw a dark mouth where hill met root. A cave. A real one—not just a fox den—tall enough that a man could stand in its front, and dry enough that the rain slid past it like it was unwelcome.

  He leaned back harder and dragged her through fern and slick leaf, boots squeaking in mud. The cave was large, the floor tamped by animals or time, and the roof was solid stone. Good shelter. Hugo would’ve approved. He got her inside, past the lip, and let her ankles go once they were no longer being pelted by the rain.

  His arms felt like hollow reeds full of water. He bent with his hands on his knees and breathed like a bellows. Meanwhile, the lady took her pain and turned it into a tidy grimace on her face: jaw shut, lips pale, eyes… stars again. Her eyes still didn’t look real. He could barely tell if she was even looking at him with so many stars in her eyes.

  “Boy,” she rasped. “Help me with the worst of it, or I’ll bleed out and complicate your night.”

  He frowned and didn’t move. There was a howl again. Farther away or nearer? The rain made everything the same distance—

  “If I die because you decided to just stand there,” she said flatly, “I’ll come back as an undead, and you’ll be the first thing I hunt down to eat. Now, reach under my cloak. Left side. There’s a pouch on my belt with a bunch of pills.”

  That got him moving. He dropped to his knees beside her and slid his hands under her cloak, feeling like a thief and a doctor at once.

  But everything under her cloak was either sharp or glowing or making small noises to itself. His fingers brushed a three-pointed needle that hummed like a quiet bee. He yanked it out by accident, blinked at it, then tossed it aside onto the cave floor. Next came something that felt like a jawbone set with coins, except the coins were runes and cold to the touch. That went aside too. Then came a thick ribbon of cloth with little bronze bells that didn’t ring when shaken, a disc with six holes that breathed like it was tired, and then a string of gaseous vials warm through their glass, glowing faintly blue, faintly green, and faintly red.

  ‘How are there so many things under this?’ he thought to himself. ‘She’s not even plump.’

  Eventually, his knuckles knocked leather. An old pouch, cracked, with a braided cord and stitching that looked like it’d been repaired three times by three different hands. He yanked it from her cloak.

  “Good,” she hissed. “Now… open and pour everything into—”

  He tore the latch with his teeth and upended it above her mouth. White-and-rose spherical beads tumbled, clipped her lips, and for a second she choked while her throat worked against the dry medicine—then she swallowed like a snake and lay back, eyes shut hard.

  He held his breath. Outside, rain tried to get in. Inside, the air held very still around the two of them and a pile of… strange trinkets that he’d yanked out from under her cloak.

  Then the cuts along her ribs and shoulder went pink. The worst one—a wide, surely fatal gash showing across her waist—glowed like a coal being quenched, rose to purple, and then pulled itself shut.

  He watched the dozen bloody cuts and scrapes across her body close like it was a trick, but it wasn’t a trick.

  “... Ha.” She sighed, and her whole body loosened into the floor. She scratched her back without really reaching it, winced, then scratched anyway. “Thanks, kid. The undead bit was a lie. I don’t have that curse. I’ve got about… eh, twenty other curses on me, but not that one in particular.”

  As he looked her over, staring at her in awe and shock, she pried her starry eyes open and peeked back up at him with a small smile.

  “... Who are you?” he whispered.

  In response, she tugged the brim of her pointy hat down until it shadowed most of her face, then folded her hands on her stomach like she was at a funeral she didn’t care to attend. “Will you tell me your name if I tell you mine?”

  “No. Hugo said you shouldn’t hand out your name like candy. Just because the war’s over doesn’t mean everyone got the news.”

  The lady chuckled, muffled under her hat. “Smart,” she said. “How old are you?”

  “Eight.”

  “Hm.” She pulled the brim of her hat up just enough to let a grin slip through. “In that case… you may call me the ‘Witch’, and I will call you the ‘Boy’. Now that we’re out of the rain and I’m not leaking blood everywhere, be a dear and fetch me a late supper. I’m starving.”

  Granamere really was a town that rebuilt faster than gossip. By midday, the streets were a patchwork of new stones and earth, men with hammers moving like chorus lines and women pushing carts of clay and metal around.

  Dain limped along the main street with Anisa on one side and Yasmin on the other, feeling strangely naked under the attention. People bowed. Old women made sign crosses. Kids pointed and then swallowed their words.

  Anisa may have given him an eyepatch to cover up his missing left eye, but it wasn’t exactly easy to hide the double pupils in his right eye, so he hated the attention. However, Anisa smiled as if admiration were a thing to be harvested, not endured.

  “They’re grateful,” she said. “We all saw you taking down that golem, after all.”

  “That’s exactly what I don’t want,” he muttered, leaning on his cane with every slow step. Gods, he’d really worked his lungs that night. It might take him a few more days just to be able to breathe deeply without hurting inside, so he made a new goal for himself: he wanted to breathe deeper and fuller at all times so he wouldn't be as winded using his prosthetic consecutively. “Has the town contacted the Obric Border Army for reinforcements or aid in rebuilding?”

  “The mayor did send word, but given he mentioned the golem was already defeated, soldiers will not be coming for a few more days.” She glanced up the north road, where a smear of smoke still stained the sky. “But I also convinced the mayor to make the message… less urgent. You would not want soldiers trampling your peace and quiet, would you?”

  He had to admit, the thought of soldiers made him itch—uniforms meant questions—so he was glad Anisa had the foresight to help him out there.

  Soon, they reached a tavern down in the eastern end of town with a painted pie sign and a chimney that still smoked cockeyed. The cook sweeping dust in the doorway—a giant, robust man with soot in his beard—spotted the three of them and immediately bowed so low his apron threatened his knees.

  “Mister Sorowyn!” the man said. “Best pies in town, all on me for the fellow who toppled a flying ruin! Just sit wherever you want! I’ll be back with today’s specialty!”

  Dain wanted to decline on principle. He had to stop letting every grateful neck-waving cobbler think he was a saint, but hunger, and bandages, and the polite insistence of two girls who’d risked themselves for him did what threats of dignity could not.

  Passing through the tavern—ignoring the hushed whispers and quick bows of the other patrons—they went upstairs and took the second-floor balcony seat, an open-air table that looked over the rebuilding town square in the distance.

  Yasmin settled beside Anisa, and Dain took the seat across the two of them.

  … While Anisa glanced out at the town, he couldn’t help but eye her more openly.

  A princess, huh?

  Not just the daughter of some wealthy Minemaster. No wonder she had basic weapons training despite lacking the most common adventuring senses. As the Second Princess of Obric, she would’ve received lessons in all sorts of self-defense techniques, and she would’ve had the resources to obtain the Monarch Title, typically possessed only by the crowns living atop a buried Dragon’s carcass.

  And if I’d shot her without a second thought, I really would’ve…

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  He scowled as Anisa smiled at him.

  “... So what’s a princess doing in a border town with one steward and no parade?” he asked. “If all you wanted was to sniff out Corvalenne’s truth and play diplomat between Auraline and Obric, you could’ve waved that pendant, raised a small army, and marched right in with drums sounding. Why pretend to be an adventurer and antagonize bilefrost centipedes? You daft or something?”

  Yasmin’s eyes went sharp. “Mind your tongue when you speak of my lady—”

  Anisa laughed, a small, bell-clear thing. “You are crude, Mister Sorowyn. But even still, I am the Second Princess, and I was training with Uncle Borik in the Border Army’s fortress when news of Corvalenne’s destruction reached our gates. Uncle immediately sent me back to the capital for safety—despite my vehement protests—so that same night, I took Yasmin with me and split off from my escorts, breaking to Granamere so I could attempt to reroute back to Corvalenne later.”

  “So you are daft.” He scowled even harder. “You’re the Second Princess. If anything had happened to you—”

  “I do not regret what I did,” she cut in. “Only my poor estimate of my own skill, and my laughable forestcraft, so it seems I was fortunate the gods chose to send me a second bodyguard.” She tipped her chin at him. “You, Mister Sorowyn.”

  He ground his jaw and sighed. “How stupid.”

  “Says the man who helped two strangers in a forest for no reason, then tackled a golem to save them… twice. Surely you suspected we were peculiar?”

  “Oh, I suspected.”

  “And yet you helped,” she said, voice gentling, “because you are the sort who cannot let people die if you can help it, which brings me back to my question: how does a good man like you end up alone and on the run from… well, seemingly everyone? Why not run to the Auraline Border Army? Why push into Obric land instead? I doubt a man with a mind like yours got lost.”

  He snorted. She leaned forward at that, hands clasping over the table.

  “Please. Tell me what happened,” she said. “What led you to make your own Altar? What really happened to Corvalenne?”

  Dain sat quiet long enough that the scrape of cutlery below reached his ears.

  Considering she’d laid her name and Title bare to him—and in a way, her secret was even more monumental than his—he decided to exhale slowly, drop his shoulders, and let the words come.

  “I was a relic merchant in Corvalenne, no lie about that,” he said at last, “but Corvalenne didn’t get destroyed by any border army. There was no army. Three people wearing one-eyed masks turned the entire town into an Altar and offered everyone’s mana cores to a Curator God, sinking it in the process.”

  Anisa listened attentively. So did Yasmin, dropping her animosity for a moment.

  “I was the only one who survived the drop into the chasm because of a relic I had in my possession, but I lost my arm in the process,” he continued, raising his prosthetic. “A magic beast also dropped into the chasm with the town, so I made my own Altar and obtained this prosthetic to defend myself. After that, I climbed out of the chasm and thought things through.”

  “What did you think?” Anisa asked.

  He leaned back, looking at her sternly. “Apart from the Curator Church, the one-eyed are hiding amongst the Auraline Border Army and the Obric Border Army. On this continent, at least, there’s no easy way to get lightning-type and earth-relics unless you’re affiliated with an army—and high up in said army—so I figured whichever border army I run to would just silence me before I even get to say anything. In the end, I picked Obric to run into. Smaller territory, yes, but fewer soldiers as well. I thought it’d be easier for me to evade discovery while looking for the one-eyed.”

  Then a humorless laugh escaped him.

  “Didn’t think I’d bump into the Second Princess of all people, though,” he muttered. “I guess I really am cursed.”

  Anisa’s lips curved downward. Yasmin’s eyes tightened at the word. Of course, he’d told them the truth, but not the whole truth. He just felt like keeping his contact with Belara—and by extension, his ability to obtain cursed relics—a secret for now.

  The one-eyed are one thing, but Belara’s an Eighth Curator God.

  Who knows what dangers would befall me if I leaked her name and existence?

  “... So,” Anisa said, her voice soft but probing, “you had no relics before Corvalenne fell?”

  “No.”

  “And your prosthetic arm is an Elementum-Class relic.” Her gaze flicked to his closed right hand and the feathered cloak on his back. “But that gemstone in your palm… and your cloak. Those aren’t Elementum-Class relics, are they?”

  He narrowed his eye.

  The warning landed, and Anisa dipped her head gracefully.

  “Not relevant to the topic at hand, I suppose,” she mumbled. “But you must tell me in more detail about Corvalenne’s destruction, and about the one-eyed who tried to offer up all your mana cores to a god. Leave no stone unturned. I need to—”

  “You need to what? March to the Obric Border Army’s fortress and repeat my story to them?”

  She held her silence for a moment. “What are you going to do, then?”

  He turned north, jaw tight.

  “Before the gargoyle golem cracked apart, I asked it what stirred it from its slumber,” he said. “I mean, I already thought it was strange that those golems awakened now of all times, so I had to know. Want to guess what it told me?”

  “The silverplume owls woke them?”

  “A shadow in a one-eyed mask heading north reactivated them and told them to burn Granamere,” he finished. “For your information, automatons and golems remember everything they see and every word they hear perfectly. If it said it saw a one-eyed shadow heading north, then it means I’m on their tail.”

  “You have an idea where these… one-eyed are going?”

  “Braskir. Largest mining town in Obric. It’s also the closest large mining town to Granamere, so if my hunch is correct—and they’re really trying to start a war by causing destruction in every town near Corvalenne—I’m sure Braskir’s where that particular one-eyed is heading next.”

  Anisa folded her hands in her lap and let the silence carry until their food arrived: thick lamb stew, bread bright with butter, and a pie for each of them that smelled like mountain berries. Dain immediately attacked his plate like a man attempting to make his own insides stop hurting with pie.

  He really hadn’t eaten anything in three days.

  “... So you won’t be coming with me to the Obric Border Army?” Anisa said between a mouthful of pie as well. “You, Mister Sorowyn, are the only man who knows what truly happened to Corvalenne. The continent is tinder. A few more good sparks between Auraline and Obric, and we will have another war on our hands. If you were to come with me and speak truth in the open, perhaps we could still—”

  “You think that’d work?” He set his spoon down and fixed her with a hard stare. “The one-eyed buried Corvalenne and left no witnesses. One of them is affiliated with the Curator Church, and the other two are definitely high-ranking in Auraline and Obric’s armies. Who knows how many one-eyed there really are in all three factions by now? I’m sure they’re keeping an eye on anyone even thinking about exposing them, so killing all three of us before we can even reach the Obric Border Army would be small change for them.”

  “We would be safe with the Obric Border Army as long as I send word,” Anisa protested. “My uncle—”

  “Borik Hallowmortar,” he interrupted. “I know who he is. The Three-Titled Grand General of the Obric Border Army. They say he’s pure granite in the shape of a man, but my gut says even he can’t protect you from a threat within his ranks, and I don’t say that to shame your uncle. I say it because I’ve seen what the one-eyed are capable of, and I won’t stake my life on a war hero against them.”

  Anisa narrowed her eyes. “And not on my life as the Second Princess, either?”

  “If you were the First Princess, maybe I’d have more faith in you.” He shrugged. “But if I go to the Obric Border Army with you, I’m going to die, and you’re going to die with me. We’ll never make it there. Even if we do, it’s my word—a man who has broken the one law no man can break in this world—against the one-eyed within your army, and even you have no clue who they could be or how many of them there are. For all you and I know, your uncle—”

  “Is not a man who would sink an entire town,” she said firmly. “If you knew him, you would not even dare suggest that.”

  “And my point remains that nothing I say will be heard,” he finished. “I made an Altar. I can’t explain what happened to Corvalenne without explaining how I survived, and I will not die before I get my hands on the one-eyed who destroyed Corvalenne.”

  Anisa studied him in silence, and he let it hang. He didn’t mind it. After all, she was Obric’s Second Princess—surely he’d just scared her stiff with talk of Corvalenne’s destruction and hunting one-eyed phantoms in the dark.

  Good.

  He leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms. The tavern’s second-floor balcony gave him the sweep of Granamere below: new scaffolds going up, hammer-song in the streets, and townsfolk calling orders as if the golem had never flattened half their homes three days ago.

  Normal people building a normal life again. He didn’t belong in it.

  She’ll take the hint.

  She’ll walk away, tuck her pendant back under her collar, and that’ll be the end of—

  “Then it is settled,” Anisa said, putting a hand on her chest. “I will not go to Corvalenne to meet my uncle either. I shall follow you instead.”

  … Dain blinked.

  That was not the reaction he’d been expecting. His brows pulled together, and for a second he thought he’d misheard her—that maybe blood was still pounding in his ears too hard to catch the words right—but Yasmin’s sharp turn confirmed it.

  “My lady,” the steward hissed. “It is not wise to—”

  But Anisa only held up a hand calm as glass catching sunlight. “No, Yasmin. He is right. If these ‘one-eyed’ are truly rooted deep in both Obric and Auraline—and the Curator Church as well—forcibly dragging them into the light now would be foolish. What we need is solid proof of their plots so my father and elder sister can act immediately and decisively. Without immediate action, we risk alerting the one-eyed that we are on their tail too soon, and once saboteurs smell a lantern, they vanish into the walls. I know this well.”

  Dain twitched an eye. “And how, exactly, do you propose getting ‘solid proof’ of their plots?”

  “Capturing one of them alive and having them confess to the destruction of Corvalenne in the presence of my father and elder sister, of course,” she said. “You can have your vengeance. You will have your vengeance, I swear this on the rams of Obric, but first, the one-eyed must confess to their crimes and stop the war before it happens.”

  She folded her hands neatly on the table, grinning at him.

  “Until then, I will continue to keep my blood hidden, and I will keep your secret as well,” she said, brushing her hair back. “How about it, Mister Sorowyn? Shall we form a party once again to bring these shadows into the light?”

  Dain smiled.

  Then he started digging into his pie again, voracity his middle name.

  “No thanks,” he said. “I’d rather do this alone.”