“Then don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You can’t travel the Mage Road unless you start where it begins.”

  Huh. She hadn’t known that. “Well, you’re still ridiculous if you think no one has ever slipped past your barricade.”

  The large person suddenly stood between Arianna and the other four travelers, weight forward, hands out from her sides, a wall built of gray flesh. Her face bore no expression, but Arianna saw a warning in the pale eyes. Not a complicated warning, more a simple don’t.

  The four travelers clutched weapons and peered suspiciously past Arianna, toward the wall.

  Arianna heard footsteps.

  Without turning, holding the pale gray gaze, certain with no evidence at all that the connection held her motionless, she stepped to the left, leaving the center of the road free. “Nicareei Olan, Voice of the Council, I present to you Garrett, who says he’s Heir of Marsan.”

  She suspected that man who’d laughed before wanted to laugh again. Would have had this not become an official sort of stand-off.

  “Marsan?” Nica repeated, her comforting bulk easing muscles Arianna hadn’t known she’d tensed. “I see four men. Which one is it then, Healer?”

  “Bay horse. Dark blue jacket.”

  “And the . . .” She paused and waved a hand, thin copper wires knit into the backs of her fingerless gloves flashing.

  “The large person?”

  Nica’s lips twitched. “The large, gray person. You’re certain they’re not one of the shattered?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Captain Marsan’s weapon!” The supposed heir stood in the stirrups in order to shout over the large person’s head. Arianna thought he looked annoyed. Were they supposed to be impressed? “This is the last of the six great weapons created during the Mage War, created by the mages to destroy mages!”

  “Wills.”

  Wills, who’d been standing silently on Nica’s other side, twisted both hands in the front of his tunic. Even after living half his forty-two years in Gateway, he remained uncomfortable using his talent. Given the scars on his throat and the damage beneath them, no one doubted he had cause. He wet his lips and whispered, “Truth.”

  “The Records say the captain carried the weapon out of the Broken Lands.” Head cocked, Nica measured the gray bulk. “I doubt she carried that.” Generous curves rose and fell as Nica took a step forward. “You, young man, are you indeed the Heir of Marsan?”

  “I am!”

  “Truth,” Wills whispered.

  “What is he saying?” Garrett, who it seemed was the Heir of Marsan, had his sword in his hand.

  “That he believes you.”

  “Mage-craft!” one of the younger men cried, fumbling for the crossbow tied to his saddle.

  “If Captain Marsan’s weapon was designed to destroy mages,” Nica snapped, “and hasn’t yet destroyed us, what does that tell you?” Nica taught the youngest children and the lessons never really left her voice.

  The heir definitely looked annoyed. “It will destroy what I tell it to!”

  “Not an it,” Arianna growled.

  “Truth,” Wills whispered.

  Arianna glared at him behind Nica’s back. “I knew that.”

  He shrugged.

  “Hush, you two.” Nica took another step forward. “Do you see the archers on the wall, Heir of Marsan? They can shoot the shattered from the sky on a moonless night. If I give the sign, they will, albeit reluctantly, shoot you.”

  “We have business in the Broken Lands.” His lips were pressed into such a thin line, Arianna wondered how the sound managed to emerge. “We want nothing from you.”

  “How could you want anything from people you had no idea existed?” Nica asked him reasonably. “If you want to risk the Broken Lands in ignorance, be our guest. If not, come in. Bathe, rest, and we’ll talk.”

  And we’ll try to convince you that you’re an idiot. Arianna smiled, hoping the thought showed on her face.

  “I don’t . . .”

  Nica cut him off. “It’s clear we all have plenty to catch up on.”

  “I control the weapon,” Garrett declared, rising in his stirrups as though he were speaking to a plaza full of listeners instead of just the three of them. “You cannot defeat it. If you betray . . .”

  “Yes, yes, we’ll lose.” Rolling her eyes, Nica turned toward the gate. “Good thing we have no intention of betraying anyone.”

  “And they’re a person!” Arianna added, as much to the one he called a weapon as to the heir.

  RYAN.NOW

  Ryan watched the weapon—no, Nonee—stroke the sod covering the grave and wondered if he should leave. Were they done for now? Had they started?

  Before he could decide, she tipped her head slightly to the left, and spoke slowly enough to make the local slur of words comprehensible. “You’re too young to be Garrett Heir’s son, though the healers say a man’s seed doesn’t wither with age. Grandson?”

  “Great-nephew,” Ryan replied, mouth moving before his brain caught up. According to the Lord Protector, according to the chronicles, she never spoke more than a word or two at a time. He doubted she’d ever made an observation about a man’s withered seed to his great-uncle. They were conversing. He was conversing with the legendary weapon of Captain Marsan. About his great-uncle’s seed. Ryan bit back a laugh he feared would have more than a little hysteria in it. “The Lord Protector had no children of his own.”

  “No one loved him?”

  The Lord Protector was ninety-four and there were still those who speculated about his personal life. How much personal life could he have at ninety-four? Ryan had lost a lot of privacy when he became the heir and he hated the thought of losing the rest. “That’s none of my business. Or yours.”

  Nonee huffed out a breath and said, “Perhaps.”

  And then she said nothing at all. It grew darker. Ryan wondered how long the captain would wait once she lost sight of him. He should command the weapon now, to be certain he could control her when it became necessary. Instead, he found himself saying, “My mother was the eldest child of the Lord Protector’s brother. She was his first heir.”

  Voices called out in the distance, but not for him so he ignored them.

  A cow bawled off to his right.

  Nonee might have been made of stone, a bulky statue in the near dark.

  “I was my mother’s fourth child.” He wet his lips, unsure of why he kept talking. “I had three older brothers. There was an accident. They died.”

  Nonee shifted. “Were you a part of it?”

  “Was I . . .” He frowned. His heart began to pound as he realized what she meant. “Are you asking if I killed my brothers to become Lord Protector? Are you crazy?”

  She shifted again.

  Ryan drew in a deep breath and let it out. “No. I didn’t. Why would I? I never expected to be heir. I never wanted to be heir.”

  “Good.”

  “Which part?”

  “All of it.” Her silhouette seemed . . . weighted. As though she were judging his fitness to command when the more important question had to be, was she still fit to be called a weapon?

  Wearing beads.

  Mourning her . . . mourning whatever the healer was to her.

  Ryan only hoped that the life she’d lived for the last sixty-three years hadn’t destroyed her purpose. They needed her. Marsanport needed her. He squared his shoulders. “My wants and expectations are no longer relevant. I am the heir, I’ve been sent to find fuel for the Black Flame, and as the heir, I command your help.”

  “The Last Command.”

  “Yes.” The temperature had fallen with the darkness, but his whole body had begun to sweat. Even his shins were sweating. In spite of the heat they’d endured while they’d been traveling, he hadn’t known shins could sweat. “I command you to follow the Last Command.”

  The breath she huffed out sounded almost amused. “Close enough, Heir of Marsan.” Then she turned away to stroke the new grave.

  Ryan ignored the clear dismissal, pulled closer by the familiar curve of her back. “What was the healer to you?” he asked after a moment.

  “A friend.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s everything.”

  He heard anger and grief and awe in her voice. Softening his own, he said, “Should we call you Nonee?”

  The curve changed. Her head came up. “Where did you learn that name?”

  “From the children by the Trader’s Hall. From the line scouts I spoke to.”

  It was hard to tell, but he thought she might have laughed. “Yes, Nonee will do.”

  “I’d like to leave early tomorrow, if that’s . . .” He heard sails luffing in the wind, canvas slapping against itself.

  He didn’t see her move. One moment she crouched by the grave, the next a pile of green and yellow fabric lay in her place and Nonee bent to pick a rock off the cairn.

  It wasn’t until after he processed the sound of a wet impact and a wetter rain of body parts that Ryan realized she’d taken what he had to assume was one of the shattered out of the sky.

  Taken it out of the sky in pieces.

  With a thrown rock.

  Still a weapon, then.

  Good. They needed the weapon.

  “But you saw a person,” he murmured to Arianna’s grave. To honor the healer’s life, he’d try to do the same.

  NONEE.NOW

  “Nonee?”

  She brushed her palm over the damp grass. She sat to one side of the grave, as she’d sat to one side of Arianna’s deathbed. “What are you doing out so late?”

  Darny dropped to the ground beside her. “Mam thought you might stay here all night. So she said I should come talk to you.”

  “Did she?”

  “Mostly. She says everyone’s been asked to stay out of sight tomorrow morning, when you leave, ’cause a bunch of people are unhappy about it, about you maybe being in danger, and the council just wants the folk from Marsanport gone without a fight. Then she said the last thing we need are them seeing more stuff. The heir, he was at the big fountain when Sa Viole was there to purify. He didn’t say nothing, but Trader Gils said he definitely noticed.”

  And yet he said nothing. How much had Garrett Heir told him? She stroked the grass again.

  “The scholar girl?” Darny continued. “She wanted me to call her Scholar Novitiate Marsan-cee. Stupidly long, right? She’s his cousin. The heir’s cousin, not Trader Gils’s. That would be weird, right?”

  “Why?”

  “You know, if his cousin just showed up with the heir.” He huffed out a breath before she could respond. “Okay, maybe not weird. Do you know what a scholar novitiate is?”

  “Yes.” Long before Garrett Heir had found her, scholars used to come to speak to her. No. Not to her. At her. Eventually, she’d remained silent, no matter what they did. It was easier.

  “Okay. She doesn’t want to be heir even though she could be. I think. It was hard to get her to talk about that stuff. She only wants to learn things. But only the before things, because she didn’t ask me anything much about now.” He stretched out his legs and scratched one ankle with the toes of his other foot, the sandals he’d worn at the burial long since abandoned. Nonee waited. He’d let her know when he was done. “I don’t think she cares about now,” he said after both ankles had been tended to. “She found papers in the warren written by some kid, about burying a dragon’s tooth to grow a dragon, but I guess that only matters if you have a dragon’s tooth and Mam says there’s none of them around no more. She says that’s a good thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess. She doesn’t listen if you tell her things and she thinks she already knows the answer. I kept telling her the well was good and she kept going on about pipes and seepage and stuff. Mam said not to tell her about the archives. We’d probably never get rid of her.”

  “And the older scholar?”

  “Sort of like Sa Botec. No.” His hand appeared in front of her face. Nonee wasn’t certain what he thought he was stopping her from doing. “More like Sa Trace. You remember how two years ago she got all, leave me alone and let me do my work I’m so tired of the lot of you, even though she was supposed to still be teaching us? Like that.”

  Trace had been updating the genealogy records. Their population wasn’t large enough to let that slide. She’d spent a lot of time with Arianna when she should have been at the school.

  Before she’d died of a wasting disease the healers couldn’t fix.

  Before Arianna had died.

  “Nonee?”

  How long had she been sitting silent? How much did it matter? She pulled her fingers from the ground. “Go on.”

  “The old scholar, he’s holding something tight inside. I can tell. Like my cousin Mavs when she got with Kirina and she knew the healers were going to yell at her ’cause they told her no more babies. Maybe he’s just trying to hide how badly he wants to go to the Broken Lands, you know? They both do. Don’t know why they didn’t ask to go to the wall. The heir went, but they didn’t. I think . . .” He paused and she could hear his frown in the silence. “I think maybe they don’t want to tempt themselves? Like if they were that close, they’d go right up and over the wall. Her anyway. She really, really wants to get to the Broken Lands.” He snorted and pulled himself up onto his feet using Nonee’s shoulder. “She wants to know its history.”

  Nonee almost smiled at his tone. History was all the Broken Lands had.

  No.

  Not all.

  She roused herself enough to consider responsibilities. “Can you get home all right?”

  “Sure. Clear night.” He waved one hand at the sky; the other was still on her shoulder. “And the grrs never fly by twice. Not after they lose one. You going to stay here?”

  Yes. No. She liked that he was still young enough to use the children’s word for the shattered. She’d lose him in time, but not for a while yet. “Maybe.”

  Given their positions, he mostly hugged her head. She raised a hand and laid it against the lean, young line of his back as he said, “Be careful out there, okay? And come home.”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  She could smell dawn on the air when she woke. Dawn and the lingering scent of purkin blossoms. And sheep shit, but out in the meadow that was a given. Her skin and clothing were damp, the night weeping when she couldn’t. Her fingertips traced the joins between the pieces of sod, and the need to see Arianna one last time was so strong she curled her hands into fists for safety. Then almost laughed at the thought.

  Arianna would have laughed.

  “This new heir is younger than ours,” she said softly. “And uncertain of more than the quest he’s been given. With luck, Gils can tell me why. He stood here and said he didn’t want to be heir and it was truth.” Wills had been dead for a long time and none of his children had his talent. Ari had hopes for one of his great-grandchildren. Had had hopes. “You should have heard how he said the Last Command. Like it was almost a question. His cousin . . .”

  The heir’s cousin, not Trader Gils’s, Darny added in her head.

  “. . . the scholar novitiate, has been studying the warren. She has eyes like a magpie, looking for shiny things to steal. Where we’re going, both uncertainty and avarice could get them killed. Garrett Heir is their great-uncle . . .”

  Is their great-uncle. Not was.

  The new heir was perceptive. Why was Garrett Heir alive when Arianna was dead?

  “They have his features,” she growled through clenched teeth, anger mixed with grief. “He has Garrett’s eyes and cheekbones, she has his nose. Too soon to know their hearts.” They’d faced little danger on the Mage Road, lessening their expectation of danger to come. That would make it harder to keep them alive.

  She wanted to hear Arianna’s opinion on the danger they’d be facing. On the best way for Nonee to fulfill the Last Command. On Garrett Heir’s kin. On the seven non-kin with them. Arianna was better with people because Arianna had been a person her whole life. Nonee wanted to hear what she’d say about the horses. The wagon. The clothing.

  About anything.

  RYAN.NOW

  Ryan wished he’d asked Keetin to stay. Company might have kept him from dreaming of a dead woman watching while Nonee threw stones at gulls flying over Marsanport. As her face rotted, Arianna-the-healer kept repeating that he had to remember, but wouldn’t tell him what to remember. When Harris woke him at dawn, he was slick with sweat.

  Had he missed something important?

  Scholars said dreams were the brain’s way of clearing out old knowledge to make way for new.

  Scholars had also said the brain functioned using the movement of spirits drawn in by breathing, and recently they’d had to admit they were wrong about that, so . . .

  He’d almost finished dressing when Keetin opened his door holding two scale-mail vests. “Flame it. In daylight this room is smaller than mine.”

  Ryan nodded toward the window. “Better view.”

  “Granted. I’m facing the courtyard. Here. Captain says we put them on now. Oh, yay.” He dropped one of the vests on the bed, then dropped down beside it. “We going to talk about the elephant in the room?”

  Ryan made a noncommittal noise. Harris had trimmed everyone’s hair, cutting Keetin’s short enough to remove the sun-bronzed curls, leaving only the reddish brown tucked tight to his head. It made him look older. More serious.

  “There’s mage-craft here, Ry. There’s no other explanation for what happened at the fountain.”

  Tapping a fingernail against the central, largest metal disk on the vest, Ryan sighed. “Do you remember when we saw the elephants?” he asked. “The traveling performers up from Southport? The illusions that looked like mage-craft?”