Night six on the way to Stormearth Serenity, Anisa’s wagon continued hurling itself down the road, iron wheels screaming while the six four-horned mountain rams ran like they were trying to outrun their own shadows.

  Every time the wheels hit a rut, the whole frame shuddered, and the wind hit Anisa hard enough to make her teeth click. She kept both hands clamped around the side boards anyway, her posture tight and clenched. It wouldn’t do for an Obric princess to bounce out of her own wagon like loose cargo.

  Even if, to be fair, this wasn’t her wagon. This was a courier’s wagon made for pure speed and little else. There was no canopy, no cushioning, and no mercy. It was a far cry from the luxurious carriages she was used to riding in, but the driver had promised to reach the far western shoreline by tomorrow morning, and she believed him. She had to believe him.

  As they continued riding well into the night—only stopping at midnight to sleep for six hours before resuming their high-speed journey—Yasmin’s eyes stayed vigilant. One hand on the backboard, the other gripping tight on the handle of her swordstaff, the steward scanned the dark forest around them for hazards. Anisa couldn’t say the same for herself. For the past few hours, she’d been looking back in the direction of Karatash. She imagined the tiered streets, the iron tracks, and the banners that were surely being raised across the city in preparation for tomorrow's parade. The urge to return felt like a restless cough.

  She wished she could be there.

  “... You’re worried about him,” Yasmin said, noticing her expression.

  The wagon lurched, and Anisa tightened her grip on the backboard until the wood bit into her palms.

  “Should I not be?” she muttered back.

  “I think he can handle himself.”

  “He died the last time he fought her.”

  Yasmin was quiet for a few beats. “To be honest, I can’t imagine Karatash being in danger.”

  Anisa’s brows rose despite herself. “You do not?”

  “The independence day’s parade isn’t a tavern brawl,” Yasmin replied, matter-of-fact. “It is the grandest event in all of Obric. Your father and your elder sister will parade from the bottom ring to Fortress Karatash itself, and that’ll only take them one hour at most. It’s a straight climb up. There’ll be no deviations from the main street. Crown guards, elite soldiers, hired mercenaries, and adventurers and seekers alike will be protecting your father on the way up, and even the Curator Church’s clergies and templars would be… watchful. I can’t see Stonewraith getting anything done during the parade.”

  Anisa listened, and part of her loosened at the logic. Yasmin certainly had a way of making the situation feel manageable by describing it as a series of controllable factors, but…

  “Is it really going to be this easy?” Anisa said. She glanced down at the satchel in her lap, hugging it closer. Inside, wrapped in cloth and careful knots, sat the Reality Bubble that held the captured truth. “Are we really going to be able to expose the one-eyed like this? Will we really be able to arrive at Stormearth Serenity, present everything, and convince the crowns to believe us? Can we really get them to act upon the information?”

  The wagon hit another rut. The board slammed under her hands. The rams didn’t slow. The night wind shoved her hair across her cheek, and she tasted dust.

  “If we fail, and Stonewraith succeeds in Karatash,” she continued anxiously, “we may have another war on our hands. On everyone’s hands. If we… if I—”

  Yasmin’s hand came down on Anisa’s head, and her steward’s fingers were warm even through the cold night.

  It made her pause in surprise.

  “Relax,” Yasmin said quietly. “You’ve already done the hardest part of getting the Reality Bubble in your hands. When we reach Stormearth Serenity, you only need to speak clearly and truthfully. Present what you know exactly as you know it.” Her thumb brushed once through Anisa’s hair as she gave Anisa her gentle, familiar pats. “Your words have weight. You’re the Second Princess of Obric. You’ll do this, and you’ll end the war before it even begins, because the Anisa Hallowmortar I know is the most stubborn girl I know when it comes to convincing someone of something unbelievable.”

  Anisa flushed slightly, turning her face away with a huff that was only half-annoyed.

  “There is no need to… touch my head anymore,” she muttered. “I am not a child.”

  Yasmin’s smile widened, fond and unapologetic. “You may not be the same girl who hid herself away in Fortress Karatash anymore, but you’ll always be my little sister to me.”

  That made Anisa pause again.

  Then she exhaled, finally easing a bit of tension from her shoulders, and she leaned—just slightly—into Yasmin’s palm.

  It really was as comfortable as she remembered, after all.

  “For our mutual friend who is surely giving his all to stop the men trying to break this world,” she whispered.

  Anisa dipped her head. “For our mutual friend.”

  The inn Dain had chosen felt like it’d been built specifically to ignore joy. It was the kind of place with a leaning signboard, a door that didn’t close unless he lifted it by the handle, and a lobby that smelled faintly of boiled cabbage and wet wool. Finding it tucked away in a shady alley in the bottommost tier of the city took some time—it was now several hours past midnight—but maybe that was a good thing. The innkeeper had taken Dain’s five hundred curons with the speed of a man who’d been robbed a thousand times, handed him a bent key, and pointed upstairs without asking any names.

  At least the room itself was… generous, if one defined generosity as ‘technically fits five beds’. Five narrow cots were crammed in like planks in a crate, each with a thin blanket and a pillow that felt more like a folded sack. There was one table in the middle, but calling it ‘in the middle’ was also optimistic. Its legs were practically pressed into all five bedframes, and the only reason it still existed was because nobody had space to swing a foot hard enough to break it.

  The single window faced an alley, which meant it offered a lovely view of a brick wall that’d been patched three different shades of mortar. Given Rena had paid her final one thousand curons to the Dreamer as compensation for Dain breaking the glass bowl, they all opted to let her have the window bed… which meant the rest of them now sat cross-legged on their beds with their backs against the wall, arms folded, and staring at the table in the middle.

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  Dain could’ve gotten a better room, he supposed, but he only had two thousand and five hundred curons left, and he absolutely had to keep them for tomorrow’s shopping.

  “... So,” he finally said. “Now that we know Stonewraith is planning on assassinating the Grand Minelord tomorrow on his way back up to Fortress Karatash, we’re gonna have to stop her. Any big ideas?”

  Silence collected in the cramped room for a beat, and for a moment, it wasn’t even the inn that felt small. It was the idea of stopping someone like Stonewraith with four adventuring failures and a relic merchant’s stubbornness.

  But Kargun broke first, and his voice was still rough with disbelief.

  “The Grand Minelord?” He leaned forward, bed creaking under him. He was definitely far too big for it. “Ye’re tellin’ me she’s gonna stroll up and stick a knife in the most guarded man in Obric? There ain’t gonna be an assassination, boss. Gettin’ close to him durin’ the parade’s justa super elaborate suicide.”

  Rena nodded. “It will be tremendously difficult,” she agreed. “Many, many people have tried before. In the first two years after the war ended, there were four separate attempts to kill the Grand Minelord. Auraline sympathizers, mostly. One tried to shoot him from the roof of a moving minecart. Another tried to poison his parade wine. Another tried to rush him with a relic blade right at the start of the parade, but none of them got close, and I hear security is much tighter now than it was then. The guards around him tomorrow will be Uncommon grade, at least. Some might even be Rare.”

  Dain scratched his arms, grimacing. Kargun and Rena weren’t wrong. Stonewraith couldn’t possibly just walk into the parade and stab the Grand Minelord like it was an alley mugging. Karatash would eat an assassin alive for that kind of stupidity…but Stonewraith wasn’t stupid, either.

  And while he knew for certain he hadn’t yet seen all of her darkest memories—because he hadn’t yet inherited all of her traumas properly, and he was still missing the final, most crucial part of how she went from being an assassin for Obric to being an assassin against Obric—he knew for a fact that she wouldn’t pick fights she hadn’t already solved in her head.

  “... The river doesn’t wear down the gate that’s left open,” he mumbled. “It finds the crack in the mountain nobody ever noticed.”

  The failure four blinked at him. They didn’t hear him. He raised his head, and this time, he made sure they heard every syllable.

  “It’s something the Ironshade Corps taught its assassins,” he said. “Basically, ‘pick the least expected opening, not the least guarded one’. A target that looks unguarded can be a trap for amateur assassins, but the least expected opportunity always stays the least expected. Where is the least expected place Stonewraith would be waiting to kill the Grand Minelord?”

  They all thought in silence. The room was too cramped for pacing, but Ilvaren’s eyes lit up immediately.

  “Fortress Karatash,” she said. “The parade’s going to pour all the guards into the streets. Every Uncommon and every Rare will be drawn out of the fortress and into the city to watch the crowd, so they probably won’t be expecting any assassins to infiltrate the fortress while it’s at its most vulnerable.”

  Kargun made a low noise, halfway between a grumble and reluctant agreement. “Aye, makes a twisted kind o’ sense. Folks won’t expect someone to be waitin’ in the pantry when they’re busy guardin’ the front door.”

  Sahlir clicked his beak thoughtfully. “Fortress big. Many shadow. Assassin like shadow.”

  “And Stonewraith has the skills to infiltrate it,” Rena murmured. “If she’s been planning this for a while… she could already have routes into the fortress. It may be built like a mountain, but mountains still have cracks.”

  “So we warn ‘em, then,” Kargun said. “Grand Minelord’s got a hole in ‘is own fortress, aye? We tell the guards. Or we slip ‘em an anonymous letter, ‘imminent threat’ and all that.”

  But Rena shook her head quickly. “That won’t work. They get hundreds of threat letters every independence day from pranksters, drunks, and cowards. If we send a letter, it’ll just go into a bin with all the others.”

  “And if we walk up to a guard and try to warn them ourselves, we’ll be the ones looking like the threat,” Dain added. “Stonewraith will also definitely be monitoring the situation come tomorrow dusk. She’s a shrewd one. If she feels—in any way—that security around the fortress has suddenly been tightened, she might just give up on infiltrating entirely and wait for another time.” Then he sighed, scratching the back of his neck irritatedly. “If only I’d gotten a handwritten letter from Anisa proving my honor and identity. Without something to show I’m trustworthy, there’s no easy way for us to walk up and warn the Grand Minelord about Stonewraith.”

  He did have the flower-shaped hairpins that Anisa had given him before they parted ways, but he’d seen these pins on sale in accessory shops before. They were generic pins, so they wouldn’t work as proof of his association with Anisa.

  Ilvaren clicked her tongue, resting her elbows on her knees. “So we do nothing and hope the one-eyed bitch trips by herself? We gotta do something.”

  They were quiet once again. The inn around them groaned and breathed. Somewhere beyond the thin wall, a couple argued in slurred voices. Outside the single shuttered window, Karatash’s bottommost tier still hummed with the sounds of preparation for tomorrow’s festival—and Dain listened to them for a moment before an idea came up in his head.

  “... No other way around it,” he finally said. “Tomorrow at dusk, we’ll find the highest vantage point we can in the city and watch over Fortress Karatash. I can use my owl as well. Once we spot her actually committing to infiltrating the fortress, I’ll infiltrate the fortress using her same route and intercept her inside… and meanwhile, I need the four of you to go to the parade and delay the Grand Minelord’s procession as much as you can.”

  Sahlir blinked. “You go alone?”

  Kargun’s brows slammed down. “Hold on now. Ye just said alone.”

  “Why?” Ilvaren snapped. “Why do we get stuck playing crowd control while you get first crack at her?”

  “Because if Stonewraith feels like the Grand Minelord and his guards are coming back sooner than expected, she won’t stay and fight me,” Dain said. “She’ll pour everything she has into escaping, and if that happens, I’m sure won’t be able to stop her. So, I need you all to buy me time to properly subdue her inside the fortress. A little bit over an hour should do.”

  “And if you’re caught inside the fortress by the time the Grand Minelord returns?” Rena asked. “Even if you have Stonewraith captured—”

  “By the time the parade ends tomorrow, Anisa should’ve also reached Stormearth Serenity. If she’s able to expose the one-eyed to both Auraline and Obric’s crowns at the peace summit, news should reach back here to Karatash within one or two days, so I just have to avoid getting executed before she can vouch for me,” he said, shrugging.

  It was obvious Sahlir, Ilvaren, and Kargun all saw his reasoning, but it was even more obvious that they didn’t like his plan, still. They wanted to fight. They followed him to fight, but before they could raise their voices and start arguing again, Rena raised a hand to silence all of them.

  “... This is Dain’s fight,” she said. “It was his home that Stonewraith destroyed, not ours. Blood for blood, death for death. Surely you all understand that a man must have his revenge, right?”

  Sahlir looked away first. Kargun followed, jaw working, and Ilvaren leaned back while clicking her tongue.

  Rena waited until all three of them finally fell silent, and then she turned to Dain. Her expression was sharper than he’d ever seen it—there was no gentleness or any odd warmth in it.

  “There’s no real reason for you to ‘subdue’ Stonewraith, is there?” she said. “If Anisa succeeds tomorrow, then the one-eyed will be exposed to the world regardless. Their existence won’t be a secret anymore. Stonewraith’s confession would be useful, yes, but it won’t be necessary. Between capturing her so the crowns can execute her and killing her yourself… what is it you actually want to do?”

  Something old stirred in his chest.

  A slow, familiar, pounding heat.

  “... I’ll kill her,” he said.

  And no one argued with that.

  He looked out the window and gazed at the moon. Stonewraith was already somewhere in the city, preparing for tomorrow’s parade.

  One day left.

  One day to get as strong as possible before facing her again.

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