A Perverted Path to Victory

Sara Brown

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In her old life and her new, Sara had never been greeted with quite so much hostility as she was the day after Evie’s rampage. A squad of Warriors and mages had been waiting for Fanlah to land, surrounding her in a rush of barked orders. She’d been stripped naked the instant she hopped off the wyvern, her weapons confiscated, and then she’d only been allowed to put back on her thin-skinned underclothes. Warriors and mages kept their weapons drawn and spells ready as they stood around her in a circle through the whole thing, a mixture of half-cocked muskets, drawn crossbows, and the invisible flicker of energies waiting beyond the veil. Razor-tipped spears had prodded her into a nearby building in perfect silence, conversation rendered impossible by the thick globs of wax that clogged her escort’s ears. The Imperials were taking no chances.

The meeting was being held in something that might have once been a fortification. Stone walls a half meter thick were pierced by a timber-beamed gate, leading into narrow passageways that were blocked by similarly sturdy doors. Ten Warriors walked ahead of her, ten Warriors behind, with two pairs of mages leading and ending the column. Sara kept a pleasant, unremarkable half-smile on her face, as if totally unaware anything was out of the ordinary.

When they reached the meeting room somewhere on the second floor, Sara was all but shoved forward. It was a large space, one that might have once served as a dining hall. A long, oval table dominated the room, around which were seated a few dozen Imperials of varying ranks and titles, including a good few that Sara didn’t recognize. The high, slanted ceilings let natural light in through windows at the far wall, rendering the sconced crystal lights mostly pointless if it hadn’t been drizzling rain. It reminded her of a cathedral, but the resemblance wasn’t too strong. There were no pews, stages, or religious iconography. In fact, she guessed the space had been recently stripped bare, leaving only the table.

Her escorts spread out to take positions along the walls, weapons held in loose, ready grips as they joined the servants and attendants who were waiting for their master’s summons. There was only a single empty seat available: that at the extreme end of the table, left isolated by a glaring stretch of emptiness that could’ve fit another five or six chairs on either side. Sara sat without hesitation, plopping down as if there wasn’t a single thing unusual about the whole affair.

She scanned the attendees. General Borek and the Adjutant were the only two that she would have recognized without her Blessings. The others were people she’d met only in passing, exchanging introductions a single time before moving on. A pair of Imperial Generals, the ones that had been fighting in the more blood-soaked battles of the core territories, and several of their respective army’s higher-ranking officers. A half-elf spy she’d briefly chatted with at the party, the right side of his face still black and blue from repeated blows to the head— self-inflicted, her Blessings noted, pointing her senses to his broken knuckles. Several Warriors of great renown were seated here or there, sprinkled between various politicians without much apparent respect for rank. Sara wasn’t surprised to see that the Warriors, unlike her, had been allowed to keep their weapons.

The most interesting part of the assembly was the seating arrangement. General Borek was at the head of the table, lit by a tableau of stained glass artwork behind his back, with the Adjutant at his right side. That could mean an awful lot of things, but at the very least it meant Borek would be heading this meeting.

Borek’s chair creaked as he leaned forward, placing his elbows on the table, fingers knit together. He took a deep breath through his nose, blowing it out slowly. He was calm, but his self control was eggshell-thin. He locked eyes with Sara, speaking in a low, grating tone.

“Do you have any explanation for what has occurred?”

The silence was without compromise. Not a single soul dared to so much as breathe.

“A woman threatened my family,” Sara replied at length. No passion to her words, just a flat, emotionless statement. “My father. My sons. My wives. So I allowed Evie to deal with the problem as she saw fit.”

General Borek’s laced fingers tightened, forearms flexing beneath his fur. If a fight broke out here, Sara knew she wouldn’t find a single sympathetic soul. This would be a narrow path to tread.

“Evie Eliah Brown committed a massacre.” Borek forced the words through clenched teeth. “I have the reports. Three Honored Elven dead by her hand. Nearly two hundred civilians and House Guards shot, stabbed, or poisoned, many suffering greatly before their death. Mage Mayaran, a loyal veteran who had spent a century fighting for our cause, was tortured.” He looked down at a paper pressed flat on the table before him. “I have never seen such barbarity. Her hands severed. Her ears removed. Stabbed through her womb. Left to rot in the throes of an unholy poison gas, violated by a contraption designed to do nothing more than prolong her suffering.” Borek looked up. “That device could not have been created in short order. It was prepared long ago. The Eliah heir had torture implements at the ready.”

“Well,” Sara said, leaning back in her chair, “she did have a pretty shitty mom. Probably learned a few tricks here and there from that bitch.”

Stony faces twisted across the room. Sara’s irreverence was winning no friends amongst this audience. She relaxed by sliding down in her chair, tucking her hands behind her head, and didn’t say a word.

“Do you not care?” The struggle to contain his anger left Borek’s voice dropping to a harsh, forceful whisper. “Her actions were unthinkable! Even if not a single soul had died, destroying an artifice of ancient Elven craftsmanship is a tragedy of its own! And this! Your wife committed a massacre!”

“Not the first,” Sara shrugged. “Probably won’t be the last.” She scanned the faces of the Warriors present. “Don’t tell me you all haven’t killed at least as many people as Evie did last night. Hells, a lot of you have probably killed more people in a single battle than were in that tower.”

“That does not matter!” Borek hissed. “This was not a battle! This was not even an enemy, it was—”

“On that fuckin’ point we’re gonna have to disagree,” Sara snapped, stabbing one finger toward Borek’s chest. “Evie sure as shit was attacking an enemy. Maybe she wasn’t your enemy, but you know damn well she was mine.”

“And the others?” Borek snatched a paper up, shaking it emphatically. “Mayaran’s mother? Her father? The servants of her House?”

“What did you expect? That a tower falling over was going to pick and choose who it crushed?”

“The tower’s collapse was the cause for a mere two-thirds of the deaths!” Balling the paper into a wad, Borek flung it at Sara. She leaned aside, letting it sail past to bounce off the wall between the heads of two flinching servants. “Poison gas killed fifty of the collapse’s survivors, sword blows and bullets taking the rest!”

Sara raised her eyebrows. “Damn. That’s pretty impressive. I saw the rubble when we were flying in and I never would’ve guessed that many people survived. That old thing really was built damn well. I mean, not well enough, since it fell over and shit, but-”

Borek shot to his feet, slamming both hands on the table. “There were CHILDREN!” He roared. “The family of servants! Fifteen boys and girls under the age of ten! Three infants! They were stabbed through the eye! You have bound yourself to a monster!”

Sara looked at Borek, gaze steady. The General’s fury had left him shaking, his eyes vibrating wildly.

“And?” Sara asked cooly.

General Borek lunged forward, leaping onto the table. The Adjutant swore profusely as several Warriors reached out to grab him, a collection of arms stopping the man before he could move more than a meter forward.

“Control yourself, General!” The Adjutant barked, lifting Borek’s chair from where it had fallen and putting it back in its place. “I have allowed you to head this meeting on the grounds that you do so with the honor and decorum expected of your position! If you fail to do so again, I will have you ejected without ceremony.”

Borek’s eyes glittered with unrestrained hatred as he stared at Sara. Eventually, with clear reluctance, he stepped back, shaking the hands of Warriors off him. His armor made a clunk as he stepped off the table and sat down in his chair, fingers digging into the wooden armrests.

“What. Do. You. Mean?” He spat out. “You say and? Is that all you have to say for her?”

“It’s a question, not a defense, General.” Sara jerked a thumb over her shoulder toward the ball of paper he’d thrown. “I haven’t read that report. Haven’t even talked to Evie since I left the city. But let me guess: none of the dead kids showed signs of inhaling poison gas, right? Killed before that was released?”

“Semantics will not-!”

“And there were no signs of struggle, right?” Sara sat up straighter, allowing some of her faux dispassion to be replaced by a steely glare. “Not in the parents, not in the kids. They probably died where they stood, as if they never even knew they were under attack. Am I right?”

“Do not insult me by wasting time with questions you already know the answer to!”

Hidden by the mask of her Blessings, Sara felt a small twitch of relief. Evie hadn’t gone that far, thank god. She’d felt almost certain that would be the case, but… almost wasn’t definitely. Outwardly, she simply scowled.

“Once Mayaran chose to hide in that tower, the children were going to die one way or another. She was using civilians as a shield. My wife’s method of attack spared them and their parents any suffering. That’s more than can be said by anyone else in this room.”

Borek sputtered out a furious exclamation of disbelief, blinking rapidly. “What does that mean? None of us have killed children! Children!” He looked ready to leap from his chair again; several of the Warriors along the table leaned forward, getting ready to grab him once more. “That woman slaughtered infants like animals, and you dare compare the Empire’s Warriors to her?”

Sara straightened entirely in her chair, taking her hands out from behind her head, setting them on the table before her. She met Borek’s eyes, staring straight into his pupils. She didn’t blink.

“I said us. That we have killed children. I’m no better than you, Borek.”

His anger boiled to such a height that he fell back, dizzy from the force of his rage. “Are you truly mad?” He half-whispered. “Sick in the mind? Were the Sporatons right about you all this time?” All at once, he deflated, as if his anger had left him exhausted. “I thought you were better than this, Sara. Even after this atrocity had unfolded, I thought you would have cared. Was I a fool to think you would be horrified by her actions?”

“General,” Sara said, matching his somber tone. “I’m as horrified by Evie’s actions as I am by my own. As I am by your actions.” She glanced across the Warriors once more. “We’ve all participated in sieges here, haven’t we? Defensive, offensive, successful and unsuccessful? I have to assume so. That means we’ve killed children. All of us. Hells, Borek, you and I have killed children together. Do you think the armies of Ta-Pet were different to your own? They weren’t. They were using kids as message runners. Just like you do.”

“This is different,” Borek whispered. His expression was almost pleading. As if he was desperate for Sara to give in and agree with him. “Wars have casualties beyond those in the battle line, yes. But they do not aim for children. We— I— never have. That distinction matters, Sara.”

She snorted. The derisive noise was an honest reaction, one she didn’t have to hide.

“Does it? You want to find the mother of a dead kid and ask them how much it matters? After she found an arrow sticking out of her kid’s neck and watched him drown in his own blood, would you have walked up to her and said the same shit you just did to me?”

Figures shifted across the room, a palpable discomfort flicking across the faces of everyone, but the Warriors most of all. General Borek simply shook his head.

“I would do no such thing. Were I to witness such a tragedy, I would offer what I could. I would apologize. Ask after her needs, if she had other children who needed aid.”

“But you didn’t, did you?” Sara leaned further forward, casting a shadow over the table. “Not since I’ve been here, anyway. You haven’t done that. And guess what, Borek? Because of your army, kids have died.” Her lips split in a cruel snarl. “Do you want to hear them?”

“That-”

Illusory screams tore through the air. The shouts of battle. Borek was interrupted by the sounds of panting, tiny feet running across the dirt, and then the gentle whistle of a falling arrow.

“Ah!”

The little boy’s cry was so loud that it shook the room. The windows rattled in their frame, the papers closest to Sara getting blown across the table.

“This was in Ta-Pet,” Sara said. A panicked gurgling split the air, wet breaths heaving. “A messenger boy running between the rebel’s Fifth and Second Divisions.”

The gurgling increased in frequency, panic rising. There was the thump of a small body hitting the ground, then the sounds of limbs scrabbling in the grass. An older, deeper voice called out.

“Runner’s hit!”

“Shit!” Another replied. “Gods, look at the poor bastard.”

“Get the arrow out of his neck!”

Borek’s skin had turned the color of ash beneath his fur, his face dark. Most of the Warriors in the room shared similar expressions. The civilian authorities, the ones who hadn’t seen battle, were turning green with nausea. They’d never heard someone choking to death on their own blood. Never known how horrible it was.

There was the sound of a scuffle, hands grabbing limbs and muttered curses, and then a loud ripping sound.

A little boy’s scream shook the walls. Sara kept staring straight at Borek through the whole thing. Even as the screaming began to choke off, blood filling the boy’s lungs. Even as she played the sounds of the two soldiers trying to help the kid, one putting so much pressure on the neck that he inadvertently crushed the child’s trachea, another calling repeatedly and fruitlessly for a healer. She stared all the way until the boy fell silent. Dead. No one spoke.

“Your army did that, Borek,” Sara said. “Those sounds weren’t my own creation. I heard it happen. Just like I’m forced to hear every death on the battlefield. Do you want to know how many children died in the battle for Ta-Pet?”

“To compare the two-”

“If you go by the Imperial age of adulthood of fourteen, then there were thirty six kids dead to direct battle, another hundred dead in the rout. If you go by my standard? Eighteen years of age to be considered an adult? Over a thousand.” She pursed her lips. “Forty of them dead by my hand.”

Borek’s face was a mess. He wanted to vomit. He wanted to get up and scream. He wanted to leave the room in silence. And more than anything else, he wanted to leap across the table and shove a knife through Sara’s throat.

“There is a difference,” he croaked. “I want this war to be over. I hate that there are innocent victims of it as much as you do, Sara. But there is a difference. You can assign me the guilt of ordering troops into battle, yes. And it is true that the battle resulted in young lives being lost. But your wife… Evie Brown…” His jaw set more firmly. “She did not kill these children with an ill-aimed blow. She did not give an order that slaughtered their parents through the twists of cruel fate. She took a blade in her hand, looked them in the eye, and murdered them.”

“I don’t care.”

The room recoiled. Even the Adjutant’s emotionless face flickered, if not in disgust; there was the briefest flash of disappointment. Several of the Warriors on the room’s exterior clutched their weapons tighter, fingers twisting on the grip.

“The kids are dead, Borek,” Sara said. “Like I said: go ask their parents. Their grandparents. Their brothers and sisters. Do you really think it makes a difference to them? When you tell them how their family ended up dead? Do you think the father of that messenger boy would be any less devastated to know that his son’s death was an accident? Does that make him any less furious? I really, really fucking doubt it.”

Many of the Warriors around the room were sharing uncomfortable glances, their resolve wavering. The civilians were barely paying attention, still trying to recover from the sound of a tragic death. Borek’s lips twisted.

“It is still worse,” he muttered. Then, more sure of himself, he repeated it. “It is still worse. What she did to them? It was horrific. Maybe you are right— maybe it doesn’t matter to those that survive them. Maybe their kin will not care who killed them, nor why, only that they are gone. But that does not mean the acts are the same.”

“The results are,” Sara countered. “Dead kids. Blood and guilt all around.”

“It is not the same.” Borek’s voice began to rise once more. “She killed them with her own two hands. Both deaths may be a tragedy, but it makes her worse! If the battles I commanded have left children dead, at least I did not commit the crime with my own hand! I do not have the stomach for it! I could never do what she did!”

Sara crossed her arms. “Y’know what’s funny? I could.”

“Bah!” Borek spat. “As if! You required the Imperial Army to pass the strictest of regulations against the crimes of war before accepting employment with us! You threaten your own soldiers with dismissal or execution if they so much as lay a hand on a civilian of any age! Even captured enemies are not exempt to your laws! Do you take me for a fool? The Chosen of Amarat could not look a child in the eye and end their life!”

“Real flattering that you think that, but you’re wrong.” Hidden in the folds of her sleeve, concealed by the thinnest pocket Hurlish had been able to stitch, Sara pressed a thumb to the thin razorblade that was her spell focus. She began mentally shaping an illusion as she spoke, waiting to let it spring forth. “What you don’t get, Borek, what none of you have really understood, is that I’m a terrible fucking person.”

“Ha!” Borek fell back into his chair, shaking his head. “Pretend all that you want, Sara Brown, I know that is the greatest lie you’ve told today. Even if you were not the Chosen of a Divine Pantheon, I would not believe it. If I did, I wouldn’t even be having this conversation with you.”

Sara let the illusion fly forth. It rippled up behind her larger than life, easy to see for all in the room. The upper body of an Imperial soldier, their face shadowed by a helmet, a simple spear held in their trembling hands. They adjusted their stance several times, looking up, looking down, looking up again, and then back down at their spear, trying to make sure they were holding it properly.

As they were distracted, a rolling avalanche of black armor crashed into view. One of Sara’s thick gauntlets reached out to knock their spearhead aside, clearing the way for the tip of her blacksteel greatsword to slip up into the armor gap of their armpit, twist, and tear out through the side of their torso, spraying blood across twenty paces. The Imperial dropped lifelessly, hitting the ground long after Sara had gone on to kill others.

“You don’t get it,” Sara whispered.

The illusion restarted. The Imperial was holding their spear once more, nervous as could be, but now the shadows had receded, their helmet gone. Their face was clearly visible.

The white eyes of a terrified young girl could be easily seen. She looked down, sniffing hard, her eyes wet with not-yet-fallen tears as she repeatedly checked her gear. She looked up, caught sight of something, and looked down again, her panic clearly escalating.

She couldn’t have been any older than fourteen.

Sara hit like a meteor. The girl’s wrist broke from the force of Sara jerking her spear aside, a sickening crack that her illusions turned audible, followed by the bloody rasp of a greatsword slipping into her flesh. The collapse of a shredded lung filled the air, accompanied by the vibrating tha-thump of the girl’s pulse vibrating against Sara’s blade. She remembered that still. She had felt it all the way down through the pommel. The sword ripped out just as a second heartbeat sounded, the girl falling with a whimper that should’ve been inaudible. Her heartbeat sounded twice more, then stopped.

One of the civilian advisors stood up so fast that their chair fell over. They rushed towards the wall of servants, making a come-here gesture. A well-dressed young man reached the advisor just in time for vomit to spill between their fingers, wet chunks spattering to the stones.

“I am the Chosen of Emotion,” Sara growled into the lifeless air. “I don’t get to hide from war like you do. All of you, every last one of you, you aren’t forced to watch it like I am.”

The illusion spread. More soldiers appeared, faces stripped of helmets, arms holding spears beside the girl who had died. Sara reproduced only the sounds their bodies had made: musketballs thumping into flesh, guttural gasps sounding as they dropped dead. No screaming, no gunshots, nothing to hide the horror. The illusion continued, showing Sara tearing through their lines, blade sweeping from left to right, cutting down a dozen in little more than a second.

The scene grew wider still, the figures shrinking so they could fit within the small room. Imperial and Powdered Lead troops were shown following up a point-blank musket volley by charging straight into the wall of rebel spearmen, bayonets stabbing and hacking. There was only the sound of ripping flesh, a hundred butcher’s knives tearing human beings to pieces.

“You don’t get it,” Sara repeated. “This is what I hear every time. Every battle I’ve fought. Every person I’ve killed. I don’t get to close my eyes like you do. I don’t read the casualty numbers on paper. I see them happen. Every last one. Every wound. Every death. You think Evie’s a monster because she can look one kid in the eye and kill them?”

The battle broke apart, swathes of it fading. Individual figures in the armies, the ones that were fifteen or younger, were all that she left visible. With a twitch of effort, Sara swept away their clothing, leaving them naked. No one could deny what they were: boys who still struggled to grow more than a patchy tuft for a beard, girls whose breasts had barely started budding. She flicked away the last of the other soldiers and their blades. What was left were children, naked, getting torn to pieces by unseen aggressors.

“What was your point again?” Sara asked. “That I’m too good for Evie? That I shouldn’t respect her after what she did?” She barked the ugliest laugh anyone present had ever heard. “That’d be one hell of a thing for me to do, Borek. At least Evie made sure the kids she killed didn’t suffer. We didn’t even do that much, did we?”

The Imperial girl, the first one she’d shown, came back into focus. Sara looped the illusion, showing her last three heartbeats over and over again. The first when she was impaled, the next two when she was on the ground, gasping in agony. Never a fourth.

“Those deaths are just footnotes for you, aren’t they? Numbers on a page. Maybe a sentence here, a description of what happened in a skirmish there. Nothing more. Something you skim past as you try to get a grasp of what happened in a fight. But they’re not for me. They aren’t at all. So if Evie’s a monster, what does that make me? Someone who fights in a war, who sees every death like it was right in front of her eyes, and decides to keep fighting that war? I understand this god-cursed atrocity in ways none of you could even begin to comprehend, I feel every death that happens, and I. Still. Fight.”

Sara was still sitting, her arms still crossed. She looked across the room, meeting the eyes of all present— and holding their gaze, her illusions ensuring everyone there thought she was staring straight at them in particular.

“You think I should do something about Evie. That I should be horrified by what she did, that I should rein her in, make sure nothing like it happens again.” Sara uncrossed her arms, letting the illusion fall apart as she leaned forward, putting her arms on the table. She lifted her chin, glaring down her nose at them all. “But y’know what I think you should do? I think you should fucking thank me for sending her. Evie? She didn’t care about those other people. Didn’t give a fuck about them, not a single shred of hate or love or anything else in her. They might as well have been the bricks under her feet or the dust in the air. So she figured out what she needed to do, did it, and left.” Sara leaned further forward. “But me? Oh, I couldn’t manage that. I’m not that dispassionate. If I’d gone, things would have been so, so much worse.”

The Adjutant slumped in his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose. General Borek kept standing, hands on the table, shaking with anger, but Sara could see that her display had swept his legs out from under him. Though he was still furious, the reaction of the others in the room proved that the support he’d enjoyed a few minutes before had been fatally undercut.

Sara cocked her head and drummed her fingers on the table several times, tappa-tap-tap-tap, as if thinking hard about something. Then she abruptly leaned back, slapping the table.

“Well! With that done, and with so many important people in the same room, I figure we might as well make the best of our time.”

“This is not done,” Borek shot quickly back, fists curled.

“Yes it is.” Sara jerked a thumb at the door behind her. “Evie just arrived outside. She’ll be here in a couple minutes.”

“No,” Borek hissed. “I won’t stand for it.”

Sara stared at him, an idle flicker of, of all things, respect passing through her mind. He still wasn’t backing down. She took a deep breath through her nose, masking the sound from others. She’d had a long time to calm herself down. To sit in the jungle and get her emotions under control. Not long enough, but a long time. She’d learned the consequences of losing her cool already— thousands dead to riots and fires. Self control had become a matter of life and death for her, and she’d even gained another Level since that night. She had to stay calm.

“And what does that mean?” She asked General Borek flatly. “You ‘won’t stand for it.’ Okay. What does that mean?”

“I want her gone,” Borek hissed. “I will not have her in my army. In these lands, even. Certainly not in the Holy Capital!”

“Borek-” the Adjutant began.

“No!” He snapped. “I am a High General of the Imperial Army, and it is within my ancient rights to declare someone an enemy of the Empire! By my accord, Evie Eliah Brown will be banished from these lands!” He swatted at the Adjutant’s piles of paper. “If you wish to overrule me, put a plea in to be seen before the Emperor. If it is even acknowledged, let us see who wins that debate, Adjutant.”

“Don’t bother,” Sara ordered, cutting off the Adjutant before he could say a word. She laced her fingers together and pushed out in a long stretch, popping them with a small groan. “Let me take a little stab at what’s about to happen, Borek. Hells, I’ll give you a script to follow.” She smiled. “Isn’t that nice of me? I think it is. So here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to see Evie walk in. She’s going to say her greetings, apologize for being late, and hand her raincloak to a servant. You’re going to look at her, feel one last surge of anger, and then you’ll give the fuck up. You’re gonna drop into your seat and welcome her in, saying how glad you are that proceedings can begin now that we’re all here.”

“I will do no such-!”

Two quick knocks sounded at the door. The nearest guard reached reflexively for the handle, cracking it open to peer into the hallway. Evie slipped beneath the man’s arm before he could react, the thick cloth of her rain-soaked cloak smearing water across his side.

“Ah! It seems I am the last to arrive. My apologies for the delay.”

As she bowed respectfully to the room, the guard at the door was shoved back by a thick arm. Evie shucked her cloak off, holding it out.

Graf Urs took the cloak obediently from her, folding it over his arm.

The guards closest to the Adjutant rushed inward, bodily hauling the man’s chair behind a spear wall they assembled. Two figures Sara hadn’t even known were present appeared from thin air at the corners of the room, enchanted armor crackling with energy as they drew their swords. The rattling clack of a dozen muskets cocking back their hammers joined the shuffle, all weapons pointed straight at Graf’s head. Crossbows and pistols joined them a moment later, arrows nocked to strings and hammers clicking as the Warriors and Generals sitting at the table lifted the weapons from hidden compartments.

Graf ignored them all. He glanced around the room as he carefully bundled up Evie’s cloak, patting it at the edges to make sure the folds were neatly creased while he searched for something. He grunted out a little ah, there we go, when he saw the servants, then slipped silently into their midst. He smiled at the man who was forced to step aside to admit him, offering that polite half-thanks, half-apologetic nod that was so very normal— and so out of place for the circumstances.

With a beaming smile on her face, Evie flitted between the trembling weapons on her way to Sara, falling easily into the arms Sara opened for her. Those still watching Sara recoiled with disgust as she swept her wife into her lap, pecking a happy kiss onto her cheek.

Sara only turned back to Borek when Evie was in her lap. The man was staring at Graf, lower jaw jutting forward, deep in the throes of a truly apoplectic fury. Sensing her gaze on him, his neck ground its way toward her. She cocked an eyebrow at him, as if to say, Well? Did you forget your lines already?

Borek’s jaw worked from left to right. His tongue ran across his lips. Muscles on the side of his face, from his temple all the way down to his neck, jerked and pulsed, veins visible even beneath his vanara fur.

“No,” he whispered.

Sara’s eyes widened. “What?”

“I said,” he whispered a touch louder, “no.”

She blinked. “What do you mean, no?”

Borek stopped leaning on the table, adopting military posture. Anger, fear, conflict, it all vanished off his face, replaced by a harsh glare of authoritarian discipline. He took a deep breath.

“I mean that, by the Elven Dictates of Year 126, Aydrion Era, I invoke the power entrusted to me by the Highest Emperor as an Ordained Defender of the Empire: I hereby declare that Evie Eliah Brown is never to step foot in His Realm again, banished from all the water, sky, and land under His Highness’s Rule.”

The words hung in the air. Graf looked to Evie, who looked to Sara.

Time seemed to slow. Sara didn’t bother to hide the way she inspected Borek, nor the way her gaze shifted to the Adjutant, though the man was still obscured by a wall of bodyguards. Finally, after it seemed those holding their breath might be near to passing out, Sara brought her hands together in a delighted clap.

“HA!” She laughed, a bellowing roar that was loud enough to blow several of the stained-glass windows straight out of their frames. The crash of shattering glass was heard on the stones below, followed by the rising patter of rain ghosting in through the resultant gaps. She kept clapping, throwing her head back in delight.

“This is what it takes? For the great General Borek, honorable progenitor of the First Blackpowder Army, victor of a hundred battles, to finally take a fuckin’ stand against some cunt in power? THIS?” She laughed again. The air shook with thunder. “Yeah! Sure! I’ll fuckin’ take it! Good enough for me!” She put one arm around Evie’s waist and hopped out of the chair, cackling in delight. “Not how I expected it to go, gotta admit! Never thought you’d actually get the balls to do anything other than spit-shine the boot on your neck for the rest of your life, but goddamn! Look at you go!” She dropped Evie to the ground, giving her ass a slap that sent her stumbling toward Graf. “C’mon, Evie!” She laughed. “We gotta get you outta here, I guess! You’re going back to Tulian!”

General Borek’s lips curled. “Your mercenary company is not free of its obligations—”

For the second time in three days, Sara lost control.

“YouThinkIDon’tFUCKINGknowThat?”

The air left her lungs as a rolling, concussive cannonade, a hundred overlapping voices screeching like baritone harpies. The table was shattered into kindling by shockwave blows, a storm of dust spitting from the mortared stones above and below her. The wall to her left was blown outward, the right wall sagged heavily, and every shard of glass within a hundred paces was shattered to dust. Bloody smoke spat from the pores of Sara’s skin in hurricane gusts, spilling into the street through the broken windows, drowning everything in sight beneath a shimmering red fog. Every rhythmic syllable that flew from her lips redoubled the blasts, striking the air with the force of an artillery barrage as she began to stalk forward.

“BanishMyFuckingWifeThenTryToTellMeWhenToSayGoodbyeIFuckinSwearToGodIfYouSayAnotherFucking-”

Two calloused hands grabbed Sara by the top of her head and the bottom of her jaw, forcing her mouth shut. The thundering horror cut off with the click of teeth coming together.

“I believe we’ve had enough of that,” Graf calmly said. The inescapable force of his grip pulled Sara’s head to the right, then tilted it downward.

Evie was curled into a ball against the wall, both hands covering her ears.

“If you’re going to threaten someone,” Graf said to Sara as he began to unceremoniously drag her from the room by hair and jaw, “make sure you have the ability to follow through on your threats. You clearly had the physical capacity, but—” Graf forcibly turned Sara’s head toward the wall, showing her the way it had been blown out to no purpose, “—you still lack the discipline to act upon it effectively.” He spoke a touch louder. “Evie? Come here.”

Sara’s gut was struck by an ugly, profound guilt as she watched her wife scramble to her feet, a twisting pain that only worsened when Evie’s first action was to check Sara for injuries, searching for signs of debris that might have lodged themselves in her body.

Sara sagged. Apparently content to take that as a sign she had herself under control, Graf released her, allowing her to look back as they left.

The Adjutant and his guards, all of them, were gone. An impossibly perfect sphere had been cut from the stones where they’d last been. Teleportation magic, probably. Aside from their absence, there was, impossibly, no one dead. General Borek was waving the rest of the room’s guests out, his glaive reaching up to help secure a loose ceiling stone. Dazed expressions and a bit of a shiver seemed to be the only physiological effect of what was, in effect, dozens of bomb detonations in the span of a few seconds. Sara read Borek’s lips as she was tugged around a corner.

Yes. Yes, I’m aware. I should have known better.

“Will they attack us?” Graf asked, tearing her from her thoughts.

“No,” Sara rasped. Her tongue, throat, even her lungs, they all hurt.

“Good.” Graf glanced at her from the corner of his eyes. “Will you remain employed by the Empire?”

Sara swept her hair out of her eyes, thinking. She nodded. “Yeah. After something like that? The Adjutant’s finally getting what he paid for. A full-blown Champion at his beck and call.”

“General Borek will not be pleased by the news.”

“No.” Sara drew herself up by filling her lungs with as much air as she could, then blew it out slowly. “No, he won’t. But I’ll… fuckin’ figure something out, I guess. His army’s the only one in place to stop the wyverns from taking off when they have their gliders done. So… I have to.”

“Yes. You do.”

Sara eyed him. “Would’ve been a lot easier to beat their asses if you hadn’t been training them.”

“If you—” he means Evie, her Blessings quietly clarified, “—cannot face an enemy who has been trained in the most basic elements of formations that were first demonstrated by your own forces, you will not deserve the right to call yourself a general. I barely had time enough to teach their peasants how to keep their lines straight enough to achieve staggered volley fire.”

“Bullshit. You did more than that.”

“I did. But I believe the enemy’s tactical skill is fully within your—” Evie’s, “—capacity to anticipate. How you will fare against their numbers…”

Graf let the implication hang as they exited the building. Fanlah was nowhere to be seen. Sara didn’t blame the wyvern. The street was swimming in crimson smoke, every window on every building reduced to nothing more than an empty frame. At the very least there were no signs of rioting. She hadn’t gone that far, thankfully.

“Ah, there we go!” Evie suddenly called out, ears flicking around, fur and skin brushing against Sara’s side. “It took quite some time for my hearing to return. I fear the extent of my injuries will render healing potions not nearly as effective for several days longer.”

“Oh?” Graf grabbed Evie by the shoulders, spinning her around like she was a doll. He bent down to look at her ears, then grabbed her arm and lifted it, inspecting her skin. “Your injuries are not so great that I would expect them to induce a delayed injury recovery response.”

“Many of them were created by a partially magical source, Master Graf.”

“Wizard, sorcerer, alchemist, or witch?”

“Witch’s alchemy.”

“Ah. Foul stuff.” Graf dropped her arm. “I will have the appropriate literature sent to your Mage’s University on the topic.”

“You are familiar with the intricacies of healing different varieties of magical wounds?”

“No,” Graf scoffed, “but what damn good is that manor’s library if I can’t peruse the life’s work of someone who wasted their life on that sort of drudgery?”

“The King made your inheritance of my mother’s manor official, then?”

“He did,” Graf confirmed. “I suspect he’s trying to bribe his way into the Night’s Eye involving themselves with the coming war. Why he thinks a manor will do what a Dukedom couldn’t, I cannot fathom.”

Sara’s brain seized on that, identifying that it was a useful datapoint, only for her Blessings to summon up several conversations with Evie in which she’d mentioned Graf refusing offers of ever-higher noble rank. Nothing new there. Seemed like she was really worn out after her little hissy fit.

“Now,” Graf said, dusting his hands off. “I believe I might ask a favor of that young wyvern you wrote to me about, Evie. What was her name?”

“Fanlah,” Sara provided.

“Ah, yes. That was it.”

Graf pulled his hands apart, waited a beat, then brought them together. The shockwave of his two palms impacting one another reverberated up and down the street, blowing apart the bloody fog like puffing a breath at the smoke of a freshly snuffed candle. Somehow, despite the way doors were blown open and the cobblestones shook beneath her feet, Sara wasn’t injured by it. She’d barely even heard it.

Fuckin’ christ, Sara thought, watching Graf. The old man was squinting at the sky, one hand raised against the sunlight which had just started peeking between the clouds. Is that what the combat Champions were like? Or is he even more of a freak?

“Ah, there we are. I believe she’s noticed us.” Graf pointed across the street. “Evie, go stand over there.”

“May I ask why?” She inquired, even as she was already moving.

“No. Do not attempt to eavesdrop, either.”

“Yes, sir.”

With a stern expression on his face, Graf put his back to Evie, looking down at Sara. She swallowed hard.

Oh fuck.

“When you lost control of yourself, you hurt her.”

A pressure began to bear down on Sara. A sense of presence, as if the fabric of reality was condensing against her skin. She hadn’t felt anything like it since… since she’d fired the first cannon shot at the Sporatons. At the King. Back then she’d attributed the sensation to the gaze of the gods upon her.

Graf put a fatherly hand on Sara’s shoulder, smiling tightly.

“You won’t do that again, will you?”

“N-no.”

“No, what?”

Sara swallowed, her eyes watering like she was getting too close to Hurlish’s forge. When was the last time she’d used that word as anything other than a joke? When she was sixteen, probably, trying to convince the cop that her gun and ounce of weed in the glove compartment wasn’t hers. She swallowed again, blinking the tears from her eyes.

“No, sir.”

Graf’s smile lightened as he gave her shoulder a little squeeze. “Thank you. I know you mean it.” He turned around and raised his arm. “You may come back now, Evie. Fanlah is nearly here.”

Half-hidden behind Graf, Sara sagged, breathing hard. Her skin was cold and clammy, a sweat breaking out across her body. The exhaustion she’d felt earlier redoubled, now joined by a pounding headache.

Fanlah hit the stones right as Evie arrived. Sara waved off both of their concerns by blaming her appearance on the abilities she’d manifested, then distracted Evie even further with the pleasant news that yes, she’d reached her Nineteenth Level. They would talk about it later, but Evie was delighted in the interim.

Sara fell asleep the moment Fanlah took to the skies.

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