Necrobane

Book 2: The Warden Series

by Daniel M. Ford

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Epic Fantasy; Romantic Fantasy

Synopsis

Aelis de Lenti, Lone Pine's newly assigned Warden, is in deep trouble. She has just opened the crypts of Mahlgren, releasing an army of the undead into the unprotected backwoods of Ystain.

To protect her village, she must unearth a source of immense Necromantic power at the heart of Mahlgren. The journey will wind through waves of undead, untamed wilderness, and curses far older than anything Aelis has ever encountered. But as strong as Aelis is, this is one quest she cannot face alone.

Along with the brilliant mercenary she's fallen for, her half-orc friend, and a dwarven merchant, Aelis must race the clock to unravel mysteries, slay dread creatures, and stop what she has set in motion before the flames of a bloody war are re-ignited.

Release date: April 23, 2024

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 272

Sample

1THE FLIGHT

“Crypts?”

Aelis’s own voice rebounded against the stone walls of the crumbling watchtower. It echoed even more loudly in her mind. Hurriedly, she threw her gear into her rucksack as she tried to process what that might mean. Doors all over Mahlgren like the one before her, with its blood bowl fastened into a skull with the jaw wide open, swinging open to reveal row after row of animated skeleton soldiers. Barracks-crypts emptying, releasing who knew what kind of spectral or corporeal undead mayhem into the wilderness, and more importantly, onto the farms, villages, and orc bands scattered throughout it.

These thoughts gave Aelis a burst of energy that could only be born of fear. She tightened her belt, lashed her stick to her pack, and ran.

In retrospect, she should’ve rested and then set off at a vigorous but manageable pace.

Aelis quashed her growing panic. She did not let herself try to count how many sites Duvhalin had marked for her on the map that led her here. She set out exactly on the trail she’d left, pumping her legs. For the first hour, she maintained a good pace. Certainly she’d eaten up a few miles at least.

But the exertions of the day had been the equal of many of her hardest days training at the Lyceum. And while Lavanalla and Bardun Jacques were perfectly capable of making a student feel like the threat of imminent death was real, it never truly had been.

Aelis was learning, quickly, that the heat of combat was a very different thing from any kind of training. The energy that had bloomed in her when the crypt’s watch-spells had delivered their chilling message quickly dissolved.

The result was that an hour or so after setting out, her legs growing increasingly leaden, Aelis kicked one foot into the back of the other with a misstep and catapulted herself forward onto the muddy, foul-smelling ground.

“Onoma’s frigid tits, I’m glad no one was around to see that,” Aelis said around a mouthful of cold, brittle grass.

She pulled herself into a sitting position, yanked the walking stick Tun had made her from its lashings, and used it to lever herself to her feet. Aelis sighed as her feet took her weight; her right ankle protested. It wasn’t badly hurt, but she’d kicked it hard when she went down, and an ache was settling in. She had a lingering suspicion that walking on it all the way back to Lone Pine wasn’t going to do her any favors.

There also isn’t any other way to get there, so start walking. Make a brace tonight.

So, shifting her stick to her right hand and matching every swing to her left foot, Aelis began walking—much more sensibly—south by southeast.

She made it another hour before the combination of the cold, the oncoming dark, and the ache settling into her ankle forced her to a halt.

A rising wind whipped her hair across her face, and she found herself wondering, not for the first time, why anyone lived this far north. And it’s not even properly winter yet, she reminded herself. She was able to crest a small hill, thick with pine trees, and secure herself some shelter from the worst of the wind. With teeth gritted, Aelis remained on her feet as she dug a firepit and cleared it of needles.

“Setting the entire forest ablaze might slow down any oncoming dead,” she murmured.

“But thinking like an Invoker is not going to get me anywhere.”

When she had a small and properly contained fire lit, she dug out her lantern and anatomist’s bag and set them on her lap. Gingerly, she eased her right foot up into her lap and began probing the ankle.

“Not broken,” she muttered. But it hurt, and it had stiffened, and it was going to hurt more after a few hours’ rest.

“Nothing for it but a brace.” Other options floated across the surface of her thoughts, half formed. She shoved them away before they turned coherent. There wasn’t time, not here: not for alchemy, not for a serious crafting of a brace, not for any more significant Necromantic interventions. She briefly wondered if she could Enchant herself into simply not feeling the pain, but the anatomist in her knew that would lead to far worse damage in the long run. Pain was a warning, and a teacher.

Aelis pulled some cloth strips and some pieces of flat, stiff steel from her travel medical case. With the cloth she quickly bound the steel splints to either side of the sore parts of her ankle, her trained anatomist’s fingers tying quick, secure knots. Then she wound more cloth around the initial strips, till her ankle was tightly bound and the steel pressed cold against her skin through her stockings.

“It’ll do.” Aelis dug deep into whatever reserves of energy she had left for one final ward; Bayard’s Wakefulness. She was only able to extend it in a ring that barely went beyond herself and her fire, but if anything larger than a small dog crossed the space as she slept, it would wake her.

A bear would probably have the time to eat me before I woke, she thought, but before she could summon the will to argue with herself, she had already drifted off.

---

Aelis’s dreams were troubled. There were skeletons with points of all-too-bright fire in their eyes wielding swords that hadn’t rusted away. There was Maurenia fighting them with her until the half-elf’s own enormous green eyes had turned to ice-blue flame and the flesh over her cheeks sloughed away.

There were other animated corpses, driven by more than magical power, but by some inner force, like the one Aelis had put down at her Necromancer’s test. She imagined she saw Archmagister Duvhalin looming over the shapeless battlefield, as if she were a game piece and he the player.

There were others in the battle, if that is what it was; the Dobrusz brothers, Otto, Elmo, even Pips. It wasn’t quite a nightmare. Aelis had never been given to those; even in her dreams her power exerted control over her surroundings. But this treaded close.

Aelis woke startled. She had felt nothing and seen nothing to indicate that her Wakefulness

 had tripped. The sky was lightening, but only just.

With half a mind to look around her camp for tracks—animal or otherwise—she levered herself to her feet. Then Aelis imagined Tun’s disapproving glare if she voiced such a thought.

“As if I’d know what to look for anyway,” she muttered as she gathered her gear and shoveled dirt over her already-dead fire. When it came to the heavens, however, she did know. The sun wasn’t visible over the treeline, but the green moon was a sliver high in the sky. Still probably an hour till dawn, she thought. Nothing for it but to get walking.

---

The next three days were much the same, only colder. Though Aelis already wore the heaviest garments she had—and had slipped on what extra she had packed—she wished she had at least one more coat or another scarf to wrap over her ears and head. Or a horn of fire, or a brick set before a fire wrapped in a blanket and slipped into her pocket.

Wish in one hand, shit in the other, Bardun Jacques’s voice sounded in her head. And a handful of shit is the last thing I need, she thought, as she pushed on. She was forced to stop more often than she would’ve liked to adjust the brace on her ankle. It had swollen considerably with all the work she’d put it to.

“This is going to require a week of light duty and careful healing, with pain management achieved via regular ingestion of fermented grape analgesic. Perhaps even distilled grape analgesic,” she said. As if I can even get drinkable brandy in Lone Pine, she chided herself. “Not that it’s going to matter,” she added, going back to voicing her thoughts out loud, if only to hear something spoken. Aelis didn’t much like silence, and there’d been almost nothing but for days now. “Because there’s not going to be any light duty.”

On the prior two days of her walk, Aelis had avoided running through the treatments she had for her ankle. As was typical with that kind of injury, the only true treatment was immobilization and rest, and neither of those was going to be possible. She knew that she could make a more effective brace with some of the tools in her tower. She could distill some potions and refine them effectively now that her calcination oven was operable.

The problem there, of course, was that she’d need a steady stream of painkillers, strong enough to keep her on her feet yet not dull her senses or her power. And such action was likely to compound the original injury.

“Can’t perform surgery on myself, unless it comes to something really desperate,” she muttered. Another option did occur to her. An extremely short-term solution, at best. But she was already trying to recall which  chapter

in Advanced Necromancy covered the deadening of flesh. She shoved the thought away as quickly as it came, or tried to.

With gritted teeth and a firm grip on her walking stick, she trudged on, feeling every patch of frozen mud and every cold, hard rock in the heel and up the back of her complaining foot.

She caught sight of the dim lights and chimney smoke of Lone Pine as the sun was setting on that third full day of walking. She had approached from the northwest and skirted her tower. As much as she wanted to head immediately for its familiarity—and the full range of medical options at her disposal there—she decided the inn was more warranted.

While she most wanted to tell Maurenia and Tun—in what order she couldn’t quite decide—Martin and Rus had the pulse of the town and the measure of the folk in it.

“I can’t tell them the whole thing, so I’d better start thinking about what I can tell them.”

It was, of course, entirely possible that Lone Pine would face no threat. “But it’s entirely possible that any further animated corpses, hybrids, constructs, or bound spirits will have some method of tracking an incursion or an enemy, and Onoma knows I did sweet fuck all to hide or disguise myself. Not that there was much I could do.”

Bardun Jacques’s words came to her in a flash. Never stop in the middle of a fight or an investigation to start doubting yourself or second-guessing the action you’ve already taken. “Don’t be impulsive. But once you act, don’t stop to think what you could’ve or should’ve done differently until your action is over. Dedicate your mind to what remains in front of you, not distracting it with what lies behind.” Aelis muttered the words as she hobbled down the hill and prepared to dance lightly around the truth of where she’d been and what she’d been doing.

She tried to minimize her limp as she slowly made her way. It was late enough at night that only travelers and serious drinkers and layabouts, of which Lone Pine had few, would be up and about.

And she was right. As she swung open the inn’s door, most of the lamps and rushlights had been doused. A few shapes huddled near the hearth, where even now another one—Rus, she was sure—was smooring the fire. As one, everyone silhouetted before the dim flames turned toward her, and their relative heights made it clear that she was looking at the Dobrusz brothers and two taller folks. Unless other dwarves have come to town, she thought.

“Warden?” Rus came forward, wiping his hands on his apron. “I’m afraid we’ve not got any hot food. Martin’s already off to bed, but…”

“That’s quite all right, Rus,” Aelis answered, conscious of the constant ache in her ankle and the way it made her whole leg feel wooden. Rather than come

forward, she stood in place. Let them come to me. Command the room. “I’m not hungry.” A bald-faced lie; she was starving for something other than the dried rations she’d survived on for the past six days. “But I do have some news to pass on.”

The Dobruszes—it was them, she could tell by the rumbling from Andresh, the dwarfish words she could never make out—came rolling up toward her. Maurenia, the tallest shape in the dim taproom, stayed a few paces distant.

“Something bad?” Rus’s face came into focus. A bit sad, a bit worried, as it always was, but it was a determined face, too. A lived-in face.

“Well, it’s not a parade of fairies farting gold and pissing ale into every pot that’s held for them,” Aelis said. “I don’t want to get anyone too alarmed, but if the folk have got procedures for threats, they should start engaging them.”

“You don’t want folks to get alarmed, but you are telling them there’s a threat? That’ll alarm them a hell of a lot more than if you just tell us what’s what, Warden,” Rus said, rubbing a hand against his forehead.

“These folk aren’t children,” Timmuk said, while Andresh muttered behind him.

They’re right, Aelis thought. I’m going to have to tell them something. “Rus, what I mean is, I’ll lay out some steps folk should take. It’s probably nothing to worry too much about. But if I could, I’d like to stay in the village tonight.”

Behind him, Maurenia stirred. Rus made as if to speak, paused, and simply nodded.

“Of course, Warden, of course. No problem at all. I don’t know that you’ll be able to address the whole village at once, different folk going all about the place, but Martin and I’ll try to gather what ears we can to listen to what you have to say.”

“That would be a help,” Aelis said. And it allows me time to think of just how I’m going to lie to them, which is nice.

“I’m off to bed then, unless anyone needs aught else?” Rus looked down at the dwarves and back over his shoulder at Maurenia, and when no answers were forthcoming, darted off to the dark kitchen and beyond.

“I’m going to assume,” Timmuk began, “that you bear ill news that we will all be loath to hear. Is it best to save it for the morning? Will it keep, or must it be whispered in the dark around cold coals?”

“I think I need sleep if I’m to tell it correctly, Timmuk. But I am glad to find you here. I may have work for you.”

“We are warranted to return south before too much longer, but exceptions could be made, at need. The morning, then.”

And with the heavy footfalls of the dwarves receding, Aelis was left alone in the dark taproom

with Maurenia, who moved to her side and took her hand. “How bad? Don’t try to distract me with nonsense, either.”

“Bad,” Aelis whispered. “I think.”

“On a scale from ‘someone could get hurt’ to ‘it’s the end of all things, so let’s get drunk in bed’?”

Aelis chuckled ruefully. “Bad border skirmish,” she said, after some thought, resisting the urge to lean against Maurenia’s shoulder.

“A bad border skirmish might as well be the apocalypse to this village,” Maurenia said. “Are there troops nearby that can be sent for?”

“Might be,” Aelis said. “And if there are, I’ll look for volunteers to go get them.” She shifted her weight, and Maurenia’s elfish eyes read her wince too well.

“You’re hurt,” she said, frowning.

“Nothing a bit of rest won’t cure,” Aelis said. Fatigue and hunger clashed in her, and with a different kind of hunger as Maurenia slipped an arm around her waist.

Going up the stairs was more of a chore than it should’ve been, and she found herself leaning on Maurenia despite her determination not to. Standing still had given her ankle time to stiffen and swell and generally become a bastard thing, and Aelis was keeping her foot clear of the floor by the time they made it into Maurenia’s room.

Her impulse was to dump her stick, her pack, and all her other gear in a heap in a corner, as she would’ve done in her tower if no one was near. But Maurenia kept her spaces tidy as a rule; Aelis knew that much for certain. So, leaning against the wall, she set her stick in the corner, unslung her pack, and began fumbling at her swordbelt.

Before she got it off, Maurenia was behind her, encircling Aelis’s waist with her arms. She dealt with the swordbelt first, laid the tooled calfskin with sword and dagger carefully on her small footlocker, then she was behind Aelis again, her hands strong and careful, urgent without being demanding or forceful. Before Aelis knew it, she was down to her chemise and her stockings and socks, and Maurenia was leading her to the bed. She sat down, quiet and unprotesting. Her skin felt warm despite the cold drafts in the room. Maurenia’s hands lingered in places. Aelis’s breath caught in her throat. She felt Maurenia’s fingers stop at the strips of cloth bound over a brace around her ankle.

“I suppose prolonged bed rest is out of the question for this?”

“Afraid so,” Aelis answered, her voice turning distant.

Maurenia made quick work of the brace. Aelis exhaled sharply as the half-elf’s fingers probed the swollen skin. “This looks bad.”

“I’ll examine it in the morning. A few hours of sleep in a bed will set me right,” Aelis

murmured.

Maurenia prodded the ankle again. It was all Aelis could do not to yank her leg away from her touch. “Please let the medical professional deal with that.”

Maurenia stood, her nose wrinkling, and leaned in close, her face inches from Aelis’s. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of getting a tub dragged out and water heated before you sleep tonight.”

“Rus and Martin will hop if I call, but I won’t,” Aelis said. “Because I don’t want to abuse their trust, and because if I sit in a tub with more than three inches of water in it right now, I will certainly drown.”

“Drown?” Maurenia tilted her head to one side.

“I am going to fall asleep in a very short while whether I’m in a bath or otherwise.”

“Fine. Into the bed with you then.”

Maurenia gently pressed Aelis back upon the bedclothes. The rough mattress and homespun blankets felt as soft and luxurious as the finest sheets in her father’s best palace. For a moment, she was dimly aware of Maurenia sliding in beside her, and then she was asleep.

 

2PLANS, COUNCILS, AND BAD ANKLES

Aelis swam toward morning through a sea of half-remembered classes where the lecturers and her fellow students turned into animated corpses, their skin sloughing away, or malevolent spirits tearing out of their flesh like a bather shedding a robe. Over them all, the voice of Archmagister Duvhalin urged her on, berated her, criticized her form, her perceptions, her mastery of the Orders.

When she finally did wake, she was surprised not to find herself tangled in sweat-soaked blankets. Somehow, she expected her nightmarish dreams to have awoken Maurenia, who would be shaking her shoulder, worried, anxious to console her.

Instead, the half-elf was sleeping soundly, noiselessly.

The sun was only just up, a kind of barely discernible gray glow. She would’ve expected Maurenia to be the kind to be up before the sunrise, but in the time they’d spent together, she’d come to realize that the half-elf and the Dobrusz brothers viewed their jaunt as post-wagon drivers as a kind of holiday, a break from a hard lifestyle.

Aelis felt she couldn’t afford to do the same. She sat up, trying to do so with a minimum of jostle. She made it out of the bed carefully enough, but then put her weight on her injured foot. Her ankle bent inward, collapsing under her. She caught herself against the wall with a sharply bitten-off “Fuck!”

Maurenia sat bolt upright in the bed and rolled off it with a knife in her hand. Aelis had no idea where the blade had come from. But instantly, the half-elf’s eyes focused on Aelis, and she lowered the knife.

Aelis turned to her, raising a hand and beginning to murmur an apology. Maurenia caught the hand, waved away the apology, and leaned in as if to kiss her.

Maurenia broke away, waving a hand in the air. “Gods, your breath could stun an ox. None of that business till we’ve both bathed and scrubbed our teeth.”

Aelis laughed, though largely to cover a sudden burst of shame. She tried to push herself off the wall, but her ankle was too tender to take her weight; she was forced to lean back against it.

Maurenia’s strong arm slid around her back. Before she could stop herself, Aelis shrugged the arm away and hopped to the only chair.

Maurenia stepped away and went to the pile of Aelis’s gear atop the room’s single chest. She reached into the rucksack and pulled out the medical bag, then grabbed a roll of bandage and the metal strips—all neatly folded and piled—and brought them to Aelis, who hadn’t done a great deal more than curse and fume at herself.

“I’ll go and have a bath made ready,” Maurenia said.

“There’s no time. Not for a proper soak, anyway,” Aelis said.

“Just what did you find out there, then? If you’re going to be cryptic and dance around it, I’ll go get that tub up here anyway. And I won’t let you in it.” Maurenia tried a smile. “You’ll have to watch.”

Aelis cut her mind off before it could run too far in that particular direction. “A high-ranking wizard sent me maps showing the locations of old barracks-crypts all over Old Ystain and directed me to neutralize

 them. I found one. A small one. I destroyed the animated corpses inside it.”

“Sounds like victory to me. What’s the problem?”

Aelis took a deep breath. “If I’m reading the signs right, when I opened one barracks-crypt, I opened them all.”

Maurenia was not—and this was one reason Aelis found her so alluring—one to gawp or to waste time. She grasped a situation quickly, and had a gift for zeroing in on the information she needed.

“Define all. All in Mahlgren? All in Old Ystain? All on the entire continent?”

“I think somewhere between the first and the second. Certainly, several crypts were linked in one system. I had to…” Aelis hesitated. “To demonstrate my competence to gain entry to the first. Once I did that, I think the system assumed a catastrophe was imminent, or that I possessed a control device of some kind. It referred to crypts. The crypts were opened.”

“Does the door swing both ways?” Maurenia held out the materials for Aelis’s makeshift brace.

“That’s the first thing I tried. No luck, again, not without some kind of control device. A rod, a stone, a scepter, who knows? Typically one of those, though.” Aelis placed the first piece of steel against her ankle, wincing not only at the cold metal but at the pressure. Sucking in her breath to keep from gasping, she bound it quickly, then the second piece on the other side, and soon had her ankle tightly wrapped.

“So how many crypts opened, then? We’re still not any closer to an answer.”

“Frankly, two is too gods-damned many.” Aelis stood, testing her ankle. It hurt enough that she bit the inside of her lip to keep from yelping, and tried to let the pain wash over her as she dressed. “All of those on the maps I have has to be my working assumption.”

“And what are they going to do?”

“Some of them—perhaps as many as a quarter, a third if we are lucky—are going to crumble apart after years of disuse. It’ll depend on the materials, what kind of animations or bindings we’re dealing with. The rest? Spill forth and look for enemies.”

“And what’ll they find?”

“My tracks, for one. Possibly some roving orc hunters. A hibernating bear or two?” Aelis swallowed as she cinched her robes closed over her leggings and chemise. “And, much as I hate to say it, possibly Lone Pine.”

“Aelis. If they find your tracks and orc bands, then orc bands will probably also find your tracks. If we take these numbers and add them together…”

“We get a gods-damned diplomatic breach, a border flare, a restart of hostilities.” Fuck. How did I not think of that? I was too focused on my first ring of consequences. I ignored the second and the third.

“So, what do we do?”

Aelis sighed. “Let the town know so they can prepare a defense. I can send a message if need be, but no aid is going to arrive in time to matter.”

“You’ve got mine.

And Tun’s, I wager.”

“That’s a start. The Dobrusz brothers?”

“I can talk them into it. Money would talk them into it faster.”

“Then we’d better get started. I’ll talk to Martin and Rus, ask them to gather the most reliable folk of the village, the veterans.”

“And then?”

“I tell them what I need to tell them. Then … I don’t know. But I need to gather resources, consult a book or two.” Aelis heard Bardun Jacques’s voice echoing in her mind. Don’t go running for the fucking books when there’s a problem that needs action. Reading is not acting.

Maurenia nodded. She gathered up the rest of Aelis’s gear—swordbelt, rucksack—and helped her put it on, then went for her own clothes.

“We’re not going to get on the road tonight,” Aelis said as she headed for the door. “So don’t pack everything.”

“What are we going to do today, then?”

“Talk to the folk. Make a plan, get ready, pack. And, if you’re still interested in a bath, the calcination oven in my tower can boil water in two minutes.”

---

Aelis asked Martin to spread the word to have Tun, Elmo, Otto, and Emilie come to the inn to speak with her. “And anyone else who is a veteran or can be trusted to keep their head in a crisis,” she’d added.

“I can get the bulk of the village, or I can get Tun, but probably not both, or it’ll take all day. They’re too far apart,” Martin had said, then Maurenia volunteered to go find the trapper.

Martin put on a heavy fleece coat and a shapeless hat, and set off into the cold morning. Maurenia, similarly bundled, left Aelis alone in the inn.

Aelis wandered outside, testing her ankle, hoping the morning wind might blow some of the stink off her skin. The ankle didn’t feel any better, but it didn’t seem worse, either. She could slowly hobble about without too much pain, but she’d never make it all the way to her tower.

She breathed in the frigid air, trying to find something beautiful in it, found it nearly intolerable if she wasn’t generating some warmth by trying to walk swiftly through it. She wondered how the folk of Lone Pine, farmers and shepherds, would take to hearing that animated skeletons and assorted other undead horrors might be bearing down on their crofts and flocks.

“Warden.”

Aelis turned, hissing as she pivoted on her bad ankle, to see Martin having snuck out of his kitchen, holding a mug in both hands, trailing fragrant steam. The mug teased her with a scent she’d almost forgotten

“Martin,” she said, “is that…”

He held out the mug to her, and as she took it, Aelis nearly forgot the pain in her ankle.

“This is the first cup of coffee I have seen since I left the last post-house,” she muttered, holding it almost reverently.

“Didn’t know we had any, but I was pokin’ about and came across a small sack of the stuff that still smelled right. I think it was left here by a traveler last year. Seemed like the morning might call for it. I hope it suffices; I only ever drank the stuff when I had to, back in…” Here, Martin’s narrow face fell and his eyes briefly darkened. “I hope it’s good.”

Aelis closed her eyes as she sipped the hot liquid. A hundred memories and past tastes flashed through her mind. The way coffee had been a mystery when she was very young, a morning ritual her older siblings had all been inducted into, but not her, until she finally choked down a half cup with as much sugar as she could spoon into it. How that had been the beginning of a lifelong reliance on the stuff, reaching for it at any hour, in all weather, hot or cold, black or with cream, with brandy or whiskey or one of dozens of liqueurs on offer at Tindayr’s in Lascenice, with sugar and without. She liked it every way she’d ever had it.

On its own merits, this cup of thin brown coffee matched that available in Lyceum refectories at two in the morning. But here, on a windswept day on a village green months after her last cup of any coffee, it was perfect.

“It’s delicious, Martin. Thank you.” Aelis said the words and meant them more fully than she had probably meant any thanks she’d given anyone in Lone Pine since she’d come to take up her office there.

“Come back inside,” he said. “There’s fresh butter for the oats and I made a half pot of this…”

“I think I’d like to sip on this first cup out here, if I might,” she said, bending for a second sip. She kept an eye on Martin, though, gauging his reaction. He shot a nervous look at the back door that led to his kitchen but then looked back to her.

“Didn’t pick you for the kind to greet the morning in the cold air,” he said, watching her, at least for a moment, the way a deer might watch a hunter who hadn’t made any sudden moves yet.

“Oh, I’ve seen my share of sunrises,” Aelis said. “Just usually from the wrong side.” Martin chuckled and some of the wariness left his eyes, some tension slipped out of his shoulders.

“Have to be early risers here if we want to feed farmers.”

“How’d you learn to cook?” Aelis took another careful sip from her mug. Her instinct was to gulp, heedless of scalding her tongue. In general, she was not inclined to small bites or dainty nips, but she was going to make her first cup in months last. There was also the fact that this was the

longest she’d seen Martin out of his kitchen, much less out of doors, in the months she’d lived here, and she wanted to see how far she could draw him out.

“Self-defense after I took up with Rus,” he said, slipping into a grin. “I love that man, and he has many fine qualities, but I learned fast never to let him touch a pan. He could burn salt.”

Aelis laughed, and so did Martin, and she decided to venture on to a more significant question.

“Martin, how honest can I be with the folk here?”

“Completely, I hope.” He looked around, then leaned close. “Warden, what is it? Something bad?” he whispered.

Who does he think is listening on a morning as cold and dark as Onoma’s heart? “Yes. But I can’t see how to say it without spreading panic.”

“Warden…”

“Aelis,” she said.

Martin licked his lips and tried out her name, drawing out both syllables slowly. “Aelis.” He swallowed. “We’re not, as a rule, folk who are much given to panic. You can say what you need to say, straight on, and we’ll find our way of dealing with it. After all, if there’s some threat—some new threat—it’s our lives and livelihoods in its way. ...