Keetin met his gaze with narrowed amber eyes. “Is that what you think this is?”

  If word got back to Marsanport that mage-craft hadn’t died with the mages, there’d be panic in the streets. Mage-craft had destroyed the lives of the Five Thousand, and their descendants had been taught that mage-craft was evil. Chaotically evil. It can’t be understood, scholars declared. So it can’t be controlled. Mage-craft is like standing on a pile of oil-soaked kindling and dropping a lit taper to see what happens, uncaring of the damage done and the lives lost.

  To the people of Marsanport, the Black Flame was a symbol of how the Five Thousand had survived mage-craft. Although Ryan had heard it said that it was a symbol of how the Five Thousand had defeated mage-craft. Usually from the sort of people who puffed out their chests and declared we defeated mage-craft even though they were generations removed. He’d heard a few in the Court, a few on the street, and even a novitiate make the claim.

  More importantly, if he admitted mage-craft continued in Gateway, as the Heir of Marsan, he’d have to do . . . something, and the archers on the wall would take their shot the moment he said anything as flaming stupid as give your mages over to my judgment.

  “Ry?”

  “I think,” he said, slowly, pulling himself back into the conversation, “that the Lord Protector left the weapon here for a reason.”

  “To stop new mages from rising? Doesn’t seem to be working, does it?”

  Ryan remembered how the shattered had sounded hitting the ground in moist pieces. “She’s not exactly subtle,” he admitted.

  “Can we trust her?”

  “We can trust she’ll follow the Last Command.”

  “Because the Lord Protector told you so?” Keetin huffed out a breath. “No offense, Heir of Marsan, but half the time, the Lord Protector couldn’t remember who you were.”

  “We’re here,” Ryan said. And meant, nothing we can do about that now.

  “Yeah.” Keetin stood, picked up his vest, and nudged Ryan’s closer. “Now it’s real. We were riding into danger when we left home, braving the Broken Lands to fuel the Black Flame and keep Marsanport safe, then we spent all that time traveling and forgot that traveling wasn’t the point.” He shifted the vest from hand to hand, scales hissing as they rubbed against each other. “Can you control her? Nonee?”

  Ryan thought back over the single conversation he’d had with the weapon. “I don’t think it works that way.”

  LYELEE.NOW

  Lyelee glared around the training floor above the stable. The interior had been as thoroughly gutted as the building across the courtyard; nothing of the time before the Mage War remained.

  “Afraid the locals will learn stuff they shouldn’t know?” Destros asked as he set the last box sealed with a scholar’s blue ribbon on the pile.

  “Of course not.” Gearing waved him away without looking up. “We’re taking that with us. You don’t hand a child a torch and send it to play in a haymow.”

  The guardian opened his mouth, closed it again, and headed for the stairs, murmuring, “Well, you’re not wrong.”

  When his receding footsteps told her he’d reached the stable floor, Lyelee unclipped a sheath of papers and fanned them out on the trade table. “These are the pages with the descriptions of the plants and animals the Lord Protector’s party was attacked by. Scholar Novitiate Treen did a good job on the copies.”

  “Her condensed writing is better than yours.”

  “And yours,” Lyelee pointed out. “Shall you carry them or shall I?”

  He tapped his nose with the pencil. “You’re carrying the copy of the edibles list. I’ll take them.”

  “I’ll miss the wagon when we have to carry samples out,” she muttered, reaching for his bag.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Gearing slapped his palm down, closing the flap before she got it all the way open. “We won’t be carrying the samples. Not with four guardians, Harris, and the recorded strength of the weapon.” When he realized she was staring at his hand, he added, “On second thought, there’s no point in carrying the edibles list. We can’t count on what was edible then to be edible now and I don’t want to have to explain that every time we stop. Leave it. You’ll carry the record of attacks instead.”

  “We can’t count on what attacked the Lord Protector to be unchanged either.” She frowned down at the stack of papers, shuffled out the records of attack, and looked up to see Gearing had shifted his bag down the table and out of her reach.

  “Avoiding that which we need not avoid has a significantly lesser consequence than eating something we assume to be safe,” he said when he saw he had her attention again.

  “I could take them both.”

  “If you’re too stubborn to admit I’m right, go ahead.”

  Not something she was likely to admit—not out loud—but she opened the flap of her own bag and exchanged the documents, wondering what her mentor wasn’t willing to share and if he’d found it in the tenements or brought it from the Hall. All she’d seen before he’d reacted was his sample box, his sticks, and his notebook, the corners of a few sheets of loose paper sticking out from between the pages. He had his pencils out on the table, checking the cores were still safely wrapped.

  “Do we care if the inhabitants of Gateway read what we’re leaving behind?” she wondered, dropping the edibles list into the last open box.

  “If any of them can read condensed script, they’re welcome to educate themselves.” Gearing set one pencil down and lifted another.

  About to comment on the apparent lack of education she’d observed, a shriek from the stable jerked Lyelee’s attention toward the stairs. It took her a moment to realize the sound was a child’s laughter.

  “Go on down, then.”

  “To the stable?” Surprised, Lyelee spun around toward him. “Why?”

  “To discover what’s going on.” Raised brows added a silent of course.

  She glanced back at the top of the stairs. He waved her on with one hand, the other on his satchel.

  It made sense for her to investigate the sudden noise. It would have made as much sense for them to ignore it. He was definitely hiding something.

  Two-thirds of the way down, Lyelee froze as a somewhat familiar child offered Slate a bunch of red clover. The big horse dipped his head over the half door, opened his mouth, exposing huge slabs of yellow teeth . . .

  And didn’t take the child’s hand off at the wrist.

  “It’s okay, Scholar.”

  Lyelee stared down at Servan, who grinned up at her.

  “Jisper’s like me,” the guardian continued. “Animals love her.”

  Slate rolled an eye back, but kept chewing, green saliva dripping to the floor.

  “That horse loves no one,” Lyelee pointed out, stepping down onto the stable floor. “You there!”

  The child turned, tiny fingers patting a pale gray nose.

  “You’re one of the children I spoke to in the corral. Where are . . .”

  “Cali! Eril keeps taking the fork and you said I could use it!”

  Servan folded her arms as the other two children Lyelee had spoken to ran around the corner. “There’s more than one hay fork.”

  “But this is the best!” The braided child insisted.

  The palest child yanked at the perfectly normal-looking hay fork. “And you said I could use it!”

  Lyelee frowned as Servan waded into the argument. If the braided child was Eril and the smallest was Jisper, was the palest child Cali?

  “Cali! Make her stop!”

  Oh. Servan. Calintris Servan-cee. She’d been Servan for so long, Lyelee had forgotten the guardian had a personal name.

  “Ewww. Horse!” The smallest child wiped their hands on their tunic, adding to the mess already covering it, then turned to look at Lyelee. “Da is helping take care of them while you go away and I’m helping my da.”

  “Do animals like your da the way they like you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then remind him that horse bites.”

  Slate blew out a breath and sprayed the child, who shrieked with laughter and leapt back into Servan’s arms.

  Servan and Jisper were the only two people Slate hadn’t tried to take a piece out of.

  * * *

  Out in the courtyard, all three children hung off the weapon as though it—she—had been designed for their climbing pleasure. None of them appeared disturbed by her objectively ugly appearance, although if they’d been exposed often enough, they wouldn’t be. All three spoke at once, their voices a high-pitched, incoherent noise, and although it was doubtful child comprehension had been included in her design, the weapon seemed to understand what they were saying. As Lyelee watched, the palest child slipped off a broad shoulder, was plucked from the air and set gently on the ground—only to begin the climb again.

  The weapon’s hands were out of proportion, larger than they should be. The nails almost black. Her body was a thick rectangle—no noticeable breast tissue, no curve of hip. Her bare feet were as out of proportion as her hands. Like her legs, they were thicker and broader to carry her weight. Dust covered her feet and Lyelee couldn’t see if the toenails were as dark, but logic said they should be. As much as logic had anything to do with the creature standing in the courtyard.

  Her skin was a granite gray, darker and lighter flecks mixed together. Had the mage used stone in her construction? Or had that been an aftereffect of the process? Was the coloring sympathetic to the mage-craft that made her as strong as stone? Would the use of sympathetic magic in her construction be a valid hypothesis?

  “Just think of what the mages had to do to turn an infant into that,” she murmured.

  “Nothing good,” Gearing said behind her.

  Lyelee decided not to argue about it. The weapon was amazing.

  That the ancient mages could start with a babe in the womb and create such size and strength by the application of mage-craft beggared the imagination. There were those among the scholars who argued that the captain had to have been dealing in metaphor, that no one could have both the knowledge and the power to do such a thing, not once but six times. As those who remembered the days when the weapon was kept in Marsanport grew older and the Mage War moved another generation into history, the belief grew that the weapons—if more than one existed at all—had been created by more mundane means. Large, yes. Strong, yes. There were always those who were larger and stronger. Flesh and bone encouraged by magics to become what it wasn’t intended to be? No. The paintings were an artist’s imagining, and details of the sketches and the stories had to have been stretched and embellished as stories so often were.

  But there stood the proof.

  Big and gray and wearing a sleeveless leather tunic over short, cloth pants.

  “What does the weapon wear?” Lyelee murmured. “Anything it wants to.”

  NONEE.NOW

  “Nonee! Nonee! Da says I can help take care of the horses! They got a big, gray horse and his name is Slate and he bites everyone ’cept me.”

  She glanced down at Jisper swinging off her wrist, bare feet tucked up so as not to drag on the ground. “You mean he hasn’t bitten you yet.”

  “I don’t get bit. I’m like granna.” Jasper’s nose wrinkled. “Cali don’t get bit either. Is she like granna?”

  “Cali?”

  Jisper let go and pointed toward the stable.

  Nonee turned. One of the guardians paused just outside the stable door, right hand working the buckles of her left vambrace.

  “That would be me.” The guardian’s throat moved as she swallowed, but she was calmer than many who saw Nonee up close for the first time. “Calintris Servan-cee. I said they could call me Cali. It’s . . . uh, shorter.”

  “Cali! This is Nonee. We told you ’bout her, remember?” Grubby hands on skinny hips, Jisper stared up at the guardian, fearless as only the young could be. “She’s gonna bring you back, but you got to do what she says, okay?”

  The guardian studied the child for a moment, glanced up at Nonee, then nodded. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” Nonee repeated thoughtfully. This guardian, this Calintris Servan-cee who took the children seriously and showed more caution than fear, she could work with.

  “It’s time for you three to go.” Garrett Heir’s great-niece stepped forward, brushing past the guardian without acknowledgment, her magpie gaze locked on Nonee’s face. The magpie-who-could-be-heir, Scholar Novitiate Kalyealee Marsan-cee, who didn’t so much question as calculate, would bear watching.

  “Do we have to go, Nonee?” Playz demanded. “We didn’t get to spend no time with you at all.”

  “We could come with you as far as the wall,” Eril suggested, arms folded.

  “And how would you get home from the wall?” she asked.

  The child’s gaze flipped around the courtyard until she pointed at Gils. “He’s not going with you, right? Not outside the wall. He can take us home!”

  “He is the cat’s father.” It was something Arianna used to say. Names were important to her. Nonee drew in a deep breath and slowly released it. Grief would be her companion as she dealt with the Last Command.

  “Trader Gils!” Eril called imperiously.

  “Trader Gils is not your caretaker.” She raised a hand and held the trader in place. He was a soft touch with children and these three would walk all over him. “Go home now, and when this is over . . .”

  “You’ll come play?”

  “Yes.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yes.”

  Jisper pushed past the older child. “Cross your heart and spit in your eye, eaten by grrs if you’re telling a lie?”

  “Yes.” The corners of her mouth twitched. “Now go!”

  She bent to accept hugs then watched the children dart back into the stable, heading for the rear corral and the shortcut to their homes. Those in the courtyard watched her. Fear, curiosity, wonder, and more fear. She hadn’t been looked at in fear for a long time, but she was sure she’d get used to it again.

  Scholar Novitiate Kalyealee Marsan-cee, who-could-be-heir, continued to calculate. Without fear. She had too many names, Nonee acknowledged. Too many names and titles and they’d have to be shortened to define her. The older man beside her, Scholar Gearing, who had only one name anyone used, had his fear tempered by a hungry curiosity. He brought up a distant memory of a gull darting in to pull a prize from a pile of fish guts, darting back before the dog, whose dinner it was, attacked. She’d watch him too.

  “We were told to call you Nonee.”

  “Yes.” Her aching heart appreciated how that would never stop being funny. Captain Yansav, who guarded the Heir, stood before her without introducing herself. She wasn’t a person to the captain, she was a weapon. An unknown weapon and thus to be wary of.

  “I am responsible for the safety of the Heir of Marsan. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” She glanced at Ryan Marsan-cer, who was the Heir of Garrett. He was the slightest of the four men she could see, and the youngest, only beginning to put on adult bulk. He looked away when she looked at him. He’d been kind at Arianna’s grave. Did they see kindness as weakness? Did he need a caretaker?

  Why did Marsanport persist in sending children to the Broken Lands?

  She turned her attention back to the captain in time to see her chin rise slightly. A challenge, Nonee realized, in spite of the fear. “I need to know,” the captain said, “if you can follow orders.”

  “Yes. And give them too, once on the other side of the wall. Can you follow orders, Captain Yansav?”

  Borit Destros, the largest and oldest of the guardians, snorted, the way Blue Jin did when he was amused. Good. They weren’t afraid of their captain. Nonee had known commanders who used fear to maintain discipline.

  She’d been what they were afraid of.

  When the captain realized she was waiting for an answer, her eyes narrowed and her expression changed, expectations beginning to fracture. “You know the Broken Lands.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll take that into account.”

  “If you want your heir to survive,” Nonee agreed. She raised her voice until it filled the courtyard. “The Broken Lands and everything in them were shattered. The residue of mage-craft, with no mage alive to dismiss it, has twisted plants and animals and the stones themselves ever since the war. There’s no way to know exactly what you’ll find.”

  “It hasn’t faded? Not even a little in all this time?” Keetin Norwin-cee, who was the friend—Nonee’s nostrils flared—and recent bedmate of the Heir, spread his hands. He was so pale, she saw no difference in color between the backs and the palms. “Mage-craft that old should be a little tottery by now, shouldn’t it?”

  The heir’s mouth twitched within the shadow of his sparse beard. The novitiate and the scholar whispered about incomplete research. Destros snorted again. Servan frowned and looked as though she agreed with Keetin Norwin-cee. When he noticed her watching him, Vaylin Curtin-cee took a step back, a white-knuckled grip on the hilt of his sword. When describing the company to her, Trader Gils had called Vaylin Curtin-cee suspicious. She saw no suspicion, only fear. And hatred. She could get used to hatred again if she had to.

  Except for the pulse beating below the dark skin of her throat, Captain Yansav remained perfectly still.

  Nonee lifted her arms out from her sides and spread her hands slowly. As a gesture, to show she had no weapons, it meant nothing at all, but people who didn’t think about what it meant to be the weapon reacted favorably, so she continued to make it. This time, she mirrored Keetin Norwin-cee, who was liked by everyone in the company. “Mage-craft doesn’t get tottery,” she said.