“Are you still mad at me?” I asked, turning to face Faraya as she trailed after me. I ambled backwards down the tunnel, hands clasped behind my back, doing my best to look innocent. It was a challenging prospect, considering I no longer had any armour to cover up the damage from my excursion.

  My green shirt was now sleeveless with a large gash down the side and covered in blotches of red and black. Patches of soot and dust encircled my eyes, flakes falling off with every bat of my eyelashes. I hadn’t had a moment to wash before Faraya plucked me from the growing crowd to ask after Yistopher.

  Both pieces of armour and my falling-apart chainmail were in a heap outside the tunnel entrance. I’d told Faraya I won’t be needing it much anymore, but frankly, I wanted room to breathe after almost trapping myself beneath a building.

  The commander looked up from her report and scowled, threatening to make the corners of my lips twitch upwards. I was already in good spirits from the welcoming I received after luring away the ghouls, and her clear discomfort since I had led her to the tunnel was just a pleasant addition.

  The only other occupant in the tunnel, Prat, the knight whom the commander had brought along to heal Yistopher, smartly stayed out of the exchange, preferring to examine the walls.

  Faraya motioned to the same bare stone walls. “This passage doesn't change my stance. Why would Drasda care for any of this?”

  I resisted rolling my eyes. “You haven’t considered what this is worth yet? Either Tometh keeps command, and we can use it, or the others take over, and we trade it back to them. Can you imagine them trying to take it back for nothing after they spent so long forcing you to accept the deal I made?”

  Faraya let the sheaf of papers fall to her side, giving up on reading them by the mage light trailing above her. “Who’s going to stop them from taking it? My knights? Kylepo? If you had told me, I could have gotten us out of the deal with something of benefit.”

  I smiled. “But then you wouldn’t have been so convincingly against the agreement.”

  She looked to the ceiling and huffed. “If it’s praise you’re after with you’re gloating, find it somewhere else. Especially when there are so many marks against you right now.” Before I could ask what she was referring to, she quickly added. “Such as leaving Yistopher alone with a head wound so you could play the hero.”

  I twirled back as my smile faltered, skipping over the loose rocks I sensed behind me. My original question had been an attempt at humour; I hadn't believed she was truly still upset. I thought showing her a passageway into the heart of the capital would be rewarding. Yet now, my mood soured at her unfair dismissal, even more so when I questioned whether I had genuinely been seeking her praise.

  I shook my head in disagreement with the answer I found. I didn’t care whether she liked what I did or not. Didn’t I frequently do the opposite of what she asked? Her praise, or anyone else's, wasn’t something I strived for anymore.

  I sent a loose stone skipping down the tunnel, unconvinced by my own arguments.

  “What was the cause?” Prat asked, clearly relieved to have a topic related to his job to discuss.

  “Hit his head on a trap,” I said, reaching the same stone and sending it further along the tunnel. Yistopher would be fine even if he were alone, despite what Faraya believed. Besides, Darine was brewing a tonic for him when I left.

  “Trap…door?” Prat asked.

  “Mhm.”

  In the ensuing silence, my attention was drawn to the squelch my boots made with each step and how my tattered clothing chafed with every movement. I grew increasingly miserable as I realised new discomforts alongside my now subdued mood.

  I desperately needed a deep, clear stream to soak in with a mountain of scented soap and a night of uninterrupted sleep. The only thing keeping me from chasing people away was that everyone except the mages with mana for complex cleaning spells smelled worse. Merely dousing myself in the tiny amount of water I could extract from the air wasn’t going to suffice.

  The stone I kicked bounced back off the end of the tunnel, the light not yet reaching that far. I grabbed onto the nearby ladder and began my climb without a word, the different movements irritating new patches of my skin.

  The upper rungs were charred by the explosion, and the third-to-last snapped as I pulled myself up, nearly wedging me in the same place I had been hours before. The two knights below protested being showered in splinters, and I mumbled a half-hearted apology. Grabbing the side of the ladder, I bypassed the broken rung and called for the others to avoid it.

  I climbed out and stretched my back, rearranging my pants so they would stop feeling like sandpaper on my legs. Faraya emerged from the hatch, her scowl returning as she found me standing on the grass. The commander showed me her soot-covered hands from the charred rungs and pointed to the blast area with the shattered hatch.

  “This is fresh and wasn’t in your earlier statement. Was this what hurt him?” She tried to maintain eye contact while appearing stern, but her gaze was drawn to the abbey behind me. Prat had no such constraint and openly gawked at the overgrown barracks. Unlike the yellowed and muddy patches from the melted snow outside the walls, the abbey had mostly remained green due to a few runes left behind.

  “It was. Dragon’s breath trap rigged to the hatch.”

  “Set by who?” Prat asked, having not been given the details like Faraya. “Who lives here?”

  “Why did you lie to me, Valeria?” She held up a finger as I went to answer. “And don’t argue that you didn’t, omission of key details is just as bad, if not worse than straight up lies.”

  I raised an eyebrow, my mouth still open. Her warning didn’t change anything I was going to say. “No, I absolutely lied. I needed to get you here without a hundred questions and a squad of knights.”

  My response seemed to stun her out of being angry momentarily, then she reached for her sword and threaded mana from her palm. I furrowed my brows and took a step back. Prat followed her lead after a second's hesitation and settled into a fighting stance.

  The commander levelled her outstretched palm at my face. “I kept warning them about you. No one wanted to listen”

  The realisation of how she had interpreted my words struck me, and I raised my hands placatingly. “Wait. No. I didn’t—”

  The door to the dormitory banged open. I hoped it was Yistopher, but I knew it wasn’t a mage before I turned to look. Andria marched out with her stick, clearly prepared to make a snide remark about more mages being here. Faraya drew her sword and finalised the last tangle of mana at the sight of the grey-robed witchling.

  I dove to the ground the moment Faraya’s spell shot out. It was supposed to violently shake its target and knock them out rather than kill, but I didn’t want to test whether my sense of the mana was correct.

  “Wait!” “Get back in the tunnel, Prat!”

  The spell flew overhead and impacted the garden beyond the dorms. Faraya wasn’t used to the amplified mana of our surroundings, and the spell must have been more potent than intended. Or she wanted me dead. The ground shook as leafy vegetables were torn to shreds and the soil was churned into a muddy mess.

  The old tiles of the dorm roof slid out of place, and Andria ducked, covering her head as they shattered around her. I flipped over on my side in time to go cross-eyed at the sword thrust below my chin.

  “Where’s Yistopher, you accursed brat?”

  “Commander, there’s more,” Prat said, pointing his sword towards Darine and Maisie, helping Andria up.

  “I told you to go! Call for reinforcements. They’re witches!”

  “You’re misunderstanding,” I said quickly, leaning away from the sword point. “I didn’t mean I lied to get you into an ambush.”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Prat struggled to sheath his sword and get his foot on the top rung at the same time. Andria was cursing my name for bringing the death squads to them while the other two ushered her away. Faraya put her sword’s edge to my neck as I tried to explain further. I was afraid she wasn’t going to listen, and Prat was about to disappear to tell everyone I was a witch.

  My hands were pressed to the ground behind me as I sat back. I lifted one as Faraya focused another spell on the three girls, and I hit her in the chest plate with a heavy blast of wind. I raised the ground around her feet with my other hand still on the soil, so when she fell back, her legs remained planted.

  I crawled backwards and scrambled to my feet, flinging a rock at Prat’s head to make him stop his descent. Faraya’s spell had untangled in her fall, but she angled herself towards me with a new spell. This time, going for the simple mana arrow, which she knew I couldn’t block.

  I pulled mana to my outstretched hand.

  “Stop! Stop it.”

  My mana dissipated back into the surroundings, and Faraya stopped tying her spell, but we didn’t take our eyes off each other. Prat was frozen in the ladder shaft, arm covering his face from my rock throw. Yistopher pushed off the doorway he was leaning on behind the girls and walked onto the grass between us.

  His grey hair was still dishevelled, with part of it wrapped in a bandage stained red in spots. At least he had changed out of his burnt clothes and was now dressed in the grey pants and an open-collared shirt worn by the few men who lived in the abbey.

  I pointed at Faraya to shout condemnations, at the same time as she hurled accusations at me.

  Yistopher held up a hand and waited for us to stop competing for who was loudest. “I have a headache. So if you make me more than whisper, or start shouting again, I will knock your heads together.”

  I grumbled under my breath, irritated that he was grouping us together. He must have only seen me tripping her and not the blade being held to my neck.

  Faraya stood, brushed off the dirt from her fall, and then gestured towards me with her sword. I tried to magically yank the piece of steel from her grip, but her mana was too entrenched in the blade. “She admitted to backstabbing us, and I thought she’d killed you. My response was appropriate and proportionate.”

  Yistopher leaned on Maisie’s shoulder as the witchling helped him walk straight, despite the girl only coming up to his chest. I raised an eyebrow at the sight, curious how he’d won them over. “Thank you. Well, I’m not all the way dead despite feeling like it. And you, Val? What’s your excuse?”

  “Excuse? Sir?” Faraya sputtered.

  I brushed my finger along the line of blood on my neck where Faraya’s sword had nicked me. “She attacked me because she jumped to conclusions.”

  “You admitted to lying—”

  “That’s not a good enough reason to try to kill—”

  “Shut…up,” Yistopher moaned, clutching his bandaged head. “Valeria. You honestly want to claim you have no responsibility in this?”

  I straightened my back and sifted through a number of explanations. “I… used a poor choice of words that may have suggested sinister motives for bringing her here.”

  Yistopher sighed, almost turning into an annoyed growl. “You’ve spent too much time with Jeremy. Take ownership over your fuck up, so I can move onto admonishing the commander for hers.”

  Faraya bristled, but stayed silent this time.

  I nudged some loose soil with the end of my boot and looked away. “I messed up, but she shouldn’t have been so quick or eager to attack me.”

  That was the best he was getting out of me, and he seemed to realise the same. “No, she shouldn’t have.”

  Faraya sheathed her sword and walked towards Yistopher, hand hanging open at her side, ready to weave a spell. “Who are these three then?”

  Prat climbed fully out of the ladder shaft, now that it was clear he didn’t need to call for reinforcements, and moved to join them. I stayed at a safe distance until Yistopher made the reveal.

  “Prior inhabitants to this sanctuary,” Yistopher said, letting Maisie help him sit on the grass. “They’ve been quite helpful since I woke up here with Valeria gone.”

  “There wasn’t time,” I grumbled.

  Faraya’s hand jerked back to her sword while Prat kneeled beside the injured Yis. “You mean witches? You left him with witches?!”

  The second remark was directed back at me. “They’re no more witches than me, and I explained before I left that he wasn’t one of the rems. So he wasn’t in any danger from them.”

  The commander’s grip tightened on her sword. “You left him alone with a head wound, with witches.”

  “This is why I lied. I wanted to wait until you met them so you didn’t just assume they were evil monsters who hate all mages.”

  “I hate all mages,” Andria mumbled in Tehban.

  “Not now,” I said in kind.

  “Can you be quiet so that I can assess the patient?” Prat scolded, turning to Maisie at Yistopher’s side. The healer didn’t seem to mind that he was kneeling next to three, maybe four witches. “How have you treated him so far?”

  “Ahhh.” Maisie looked back at Darine for help.

  I stepped closer to hear the conversation better as Darine explained the different remedies and ointments she had applied. Prat was sceptical at first, pushing back against the assumptions made and the ingredients used, but he came around when Darine offered medical reasoning for each.

  Ultimately, the healer was hesitant to add spells to the mix, considering it was likely a concussion and would be fine with rest. He was more eager to check the herb garden, despite being raided when the elders left, seeing some exotic plants. However, he first had to listen to threats of what would happen to him if he breathed a word of any of this from both former and current knight commanders.

  Faraya left soon after, as she would be missed by the captains shortly, and Darine showed Prat the gardens. I watched after the two, wondering if I needed to point the healer toward the girl's pronounced limp.

  “Sorry I left you,” I said to Yistopher, feeling awkward that Maisie and Andria were still nearby. “I really didn’t think you were in danger with them.”

  “How’d you manage?” he asked. “These two tell me you went to remove enchanted lures you all set up?”

  “No,” Maisie chimed in. “We set up the other runes.”

  “We didn’t know how the elders would use them till it happened,” I added. “And the ghouls have now stopped attacking and are actually nearby.”

  We occasionally heard the muffled crashes of fights and echoing shrieks around us since I’d dropped the lure runes on the other side of the nearby gatehouse. It would have felt like being back under siege if not for the tall walls and escape tunnel.

  He looked up at me from his spot on the grass with half-lidded eyes. “Someone may find it convenient that we can’t send out a team to follow the coven.”

  “I… didn’t mean to?” I said, offended at the insinuation from him. “You know I didn’t. Why are you even suggesting that?”

  “Because someone else.” He nodded to where the commander had left. “Can make a convincing argument otherwise. A captive that only you could talk to? A planned escape gone wrong, and only you can explain how. An atrocity you unknowingly helped a coven commit, and then stopped in a way we couldn’t pursue the same coven?”

  “To what end?” I said, raising my voice. “I ruined their plans at the opera house, sewers, and here. Just to… what? Gain favour?”

  “As much as I dislike saying it,” Andria said. “The elders didn’t know her before, and don’t like any of us now.”

  “Well, at least you have other witchlings supporting your narrative,” Yis said, nodding.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said. “Can’t you talk to her?”

  Yistopher shook his head and lay down on the grass. “It won’t help. Who else knows enough to start pointing fingers?”

  “I don’t know, there are no fingers to point cause I didn’t do anything.” Yistopher stayed quiet, so I sighed and continued. “I often wore my helmet, so most people don’t know it was me. Maybe Tometh, but he doesn’t suspect me of anything… anymore.”

  Yistopher closed his eyes. “Just the rem commander? What’ll he think about these three then?”

  “I’d rather not meet him to see,” Andria said.

  Yistopher didn’t respond, and we watched his breathing gradually settle. Maisie shuffled away to let him sleep, and Andria and I followed.

  “You brought trouble,” Andria said, arms folded. “Again.”

  “I had to eventually,” I said. “More mages will likely be coming soon.”

  “Where are we supposed to live if you take away our only home?”

  “You could come live in Drasda? Work at the castle or an inn? Alchemy is respected, and most of their alchemists aren’t great.”

  “I’d like to work at a nicer inn than ours,” Maisie said before Andria could scoff at my idea. “Is Drasda bigger than the settlements?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Andria said. “The settlements outside were bad enough when we were in hiding. Now your elders know. The old one is nice enough, but the other won’t let us leave. Better to stay in hiding here and not let anyone else through.”

  “Faraya might tell the duke, but we can handle it with Yistopher’s help.”

  Darine came around the dormitory from the gardens, walking with less of a limp and a relaxed expression. Prat followed behind, noticeably depleted of mana, but quickly recovering.

  “It doesn’t hurt anymore,” she said, pulling up her pant leg to show the faded scars and missing chunks of muscle. “The mage says it will take a few more experienced healers back in Drasda to get it back to normal, though.”

  “And we could get Darine’s leg healed,” I said, smiling at Andria. “Are you going to say no to that?”